39.10 The Diary
The Emacs diary keeps track of appointments or other events on a daily
basis, in conjunction with the calendar. To use the diary feature, you
must first create a diary file containing a list of events and
their dates. Then Emacs can automatically pick out and display the
events for today, for the immediate future, or for any specified
date.
The name of the diary file is specified by the variable
diary-file; ~/diary is the default. A sample diary file
is (note that the file format is essentially the same as that used by
the external shell utility ‘calendar’):
12/22/1988 Twentieth wedding anniversary!!
&1/1. Happy New Year!
10/22 Ruth's birthday.
* 21, *: Payday
Tuesday--weekly meeting with grad students at 10am
Supowit, Shen, Bitner, and Kapoor to attend.
1/13/89 Friday the thirteenth!!
&thu 4pm squash game with Lloyd.
mar 16 Dad's birthday
April 15, 1989 Income tax due.
&* 15 time cards due.
This example uses extra spaces to align the event descriptions of most
of the entries. Such formatting is purely a matter of taste.
Although you probably will start by creating a diary manually, Emacs
provides a number of commands to let you view, add, and change diary
entries.
