5 ms·

I found the perfect yearly calendar (for me)

106 points by dewey 9mo ago

bananaflag 9mo ago
I have a simpler problem - I want a yearly calendar app (for Android) that just shows the yearly calendar (for any year), nothing else (no events, no reminders, no anything). Any app I find seems to disappear from the Play Store after a couple years. Bonus: show the weeks vertically.
- carefulfungi 9mo ago
  https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/cal.1.html https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/cal.1.html
  - jrgd 9mo ago
    I second cal! Also I find bsdmainutils’s calendar quite amazing in its simplicity
  - ralferoo 9mo ago
    Haha, I talked about my bullet journal approach, but there is one time I always use cal... When I've resigned from a job, I'll always the output from cal, format it to full page in word in Courier, and grey out all the non-working days, and days before now and days after my last day in the job. And then print it out and cross off each day until I leave like an advent calendar! I've had this ritual for the last 6 jobs, going back to the early 2000s when I quit a job I really hated and literally looking forward to crossing off every single day was what kept me sane in the (3 month) notice period.
- heresie-dabord 9mo ago
  Package: ncal Source: bsdmainutils Maintainer: Debian Bsdmainutils Team [...] Description-en: display a calendar and the date of Easter [...] This utility displays a simple calendar in a traditional or an alternative and more advanced layout, and the date of Easter. And here is a Bash script that runs ncal to show weeks vertically. https://github.com/viviparous/showcal https://github.com/viviparous/showcal
- oneeyedpigeon 9mo ago
  Re: bonus, are you asking for 52 columns and 7 rows?
  - bananaflag 9mo ago
    No. 3 months per row (so 4 rows). Within each month the weeks should be shown vertically (this was common when I was a kid, now even a google image search for yearly calendar shows only horizontal weeks).
- thrtythreeforty 9mo ago
  Probably, the reason they disappear is that this is the sort of "finished software" that Google makes it very infuriating to keep on the store. On Android you can build an APK like this and it will literally work unmodified for a decade. Google can't stand that and makes you make changes to keep up with shifting policies.
3eb7988a1663 9mo ago
I like a version of this[0] where the weekdays are aligned. [0] https://neatnik.net/calendar/?layout=aligned-weekdays https://neatnik.net/calendar/?layout=aligned-weekdays
- Magi604 9mo ago
  This is such a great layout, thank you for bringing it to my attention!
- dataengineer56 9mo ago
  Is there a way to get rid of the text box overlay or does it just disappear when you print it?
  - lnenad 9mo ago
    It disappears when you print!
- dewey 9mo ago
  That one kind of sparked the idea again when I saw it on HN, but it didn't have an easy way to add public holidays / personal calendars.
- adriand 9mo ago
  On the subject of unusual calendars, I helped a friend make a calendar / digital art project that has a completely alternative month view: https://turnturnturn.me/ https://turnturnturn.me/
  - anonymous344 9mo ago
    now it's the last day of the month, any way to see the next month?
- eddyg 9mo ago
  This one is very customizable: https://github.com/abetusk/neatocal https://github.com/abetusk/neatocal
tianqi 9mo ago
Our local MP (I'm in Sydney) distributed a piece of magnetic calendars to every household, which can be attached to the refrigerator. All the public holidays are already marked, and I mark my own special ones with a highlighter. It's really useful, as long as you don't mind seeing the MP's photo every day.
- absynth 9mo ago
  Put a photo of someone important there instead.
  - JSR_FDED 9mo ago
    How are you going to remember the birthday of that important person?
    - absynth 9mo ago
      I'd have already used the year-at-once calendar and put a little photo on their day. Do you need further instructions?
golem14 9mo ago
I hate to be that guy, but why not use pscal ? It has all you want, plus moon phases! It's admittedly harder to find these days, and someone should rewrite it in a decent language, but here it is: https://www.panix.com/~mbh/pscal/ https://www.panix.com/~mbh/pscal/
- heresie-dabord 9mo ago
  And I also hate to be that guy but pscal... > someone should rewrite it in a decent language was coded in BAGS (bash, awk, grep, sed) and Postscript circa 1987 [1], and it's still working almost 40 years later in 2026 ! Perhaps it was in fact coded decently. And licensed decently as well. ^_^ [1] AUTHOR: Patrick Wood Copyright (C) 1987 by Pipeline Associates, Inc. Permission is granted to modify and distribute this free of charge.
  - golem14 9mo ago
    Well, I sort of agree, it’s a thing of beauty;) and yes, still works like a champ. It’s hard to maintain though unless you really know your BAGS well. Before vibe coding, I had tried to rewrite it in python, I believe, and it turned out not to be easier to read at all… but then I got sidetracked and put the project aside. In my defense, pcal is a rewrite in c and seems horribly complex in comparison. Maybe I should try to finish it. I hope Pat Wood won’t mind.
dandersch 9mo ago
> gave that task to Claude and within 15 minutes I had a working userscript Hate to say it but you can just tell an LLM to make the calendar for you as an html artifact that includes a print view. It can also add a .ics export. Of course you should go over the dates and holidays to see if it got them right.
- dewey 9mo ago
  Yea I've thought about it and looked into some pre-made calendar components too but then I realized this will still take me longer to get small things like margins, font etc. right and it will just be yet another coding project on my pile of projects ;)
chokolad 9mo ago
Hey.com calendar has recently shipped a very nice year view https://world.hey.com/michelleharjani/building-hey-calendar-s-year-view-2e08d77d https://world.hey.com/michelleharjani/building-hey-calendar-...
kenrick95 9mo ago
I used to save Timeanddate's calendar as HTML and adjust them so they fit A4 paper perfectly (also like to remove their logo oops), but have moved on to generating my own: https://kenrick95.github.io/calendar/ https://kenrick95.github.io/calendar/ Suprisingly CSS Grid is perfect on my use case :)
matsemann 9mo ago
I love https://www.timeanddate.com https://www.timeanddate.com , they have surprisingly much nice content. Lots of stuff probably possible to find elsewhere, but it's a nice collection of utility. - Use their calendars all the time for various planning or visualizations. Like before exams I used to print one out, mark each exam, and work backward which days I would study for which subject. - The astronomy stuff is super useful. https://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/night/ https://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/night/ and it runs great on a phone. Aka I can be outside and use this page to know exactly what I'm looking at in the sky, or use it to plan to see what will be visible tonight. - I have a simple timer counting down to our planned vacation. Just fun to go to the tab and daydream. - When various holidays or red days are. Especially those that move and aren't normally marked on a calendar. Like when this and that part of Norway has their winter break.
i_have_to_speak 9mo ago
You might like this static full year planner version: https://pgdash.io/2026 https://pgdash.io/2026
tmpid 9mo ago
I love the calendar format from https://davidseah.com/node/compact-calendar/ https://davidseah.com/node/compact-calendar/
- arch_rust 9mo ago
  I found that over the holidays and wrote a cli version! https://github.com/wcampbell0x2a/compact-calendar-cli https://github.com/wcampbell0x2a/compact-calendar-cli
  - tmpid 9mo ago
    That's awesome! thanks for sharing it :)
weeb 9mo ago
Interesting how different people's brains work. I personally cannot mentally parse a month-based calendar - the distribution of weeks and weekends is far too variable. I print one of these in A3 every year [0] - easy to see at a glance how many weekends are booked up, any gaps where you need to plan something to look forward to, how many weeks of work you can slot in before a particular commitment, etc. Interesting I've never found the same concept anywhere else. [0] https://www.calendarpedia.co.uk/download/calendar-2025-portrait-rolling.pdf https://www.calendarpedia.co.uk/download/calendar-2025-portr...
- matsemann 9mo ago
  Someone once collected how people visualize the year and wrote about it here: https://nrkbeta.no/2018/01/01/this-is-what-the-year-actually-looks-like/ https://nrkbeta.no/2018/01/01/this-is-what-the-year-actually... Quite interesting how people are so different.
- ralferoo 9mo ago
  I've been a fan of Bullet Journals for a few years. I've never bought any of the official books, just use a 192 page 38 line ruled A4 soft-cover book. For a long time, I just had some "future log" pages (actually I tend to have 3-4 years worth) at the start of each book, where I have 3 months per page so I can drop in important future events (like booking a holiday 12 months out), birthdays etc (although I only copy these forward annually) and then a "month ahead" page at the start of each page where I had a line per day. I found that I wasn't really using most of these lines though because mostly only the weekends were useful for me. I switched to having a 9 month-view where I have a line per week, and the left page is the weekend and the right page for weekdays. I pen in the dates for every weekend day, and tend to only fill in the dates on the weekdays when I have something to add on a specific day. I only ever write in pencil on these pages apart from the dates in pen, so blocks can be erased easily, and I tend to use corner square brackets to highlight start and ends of longer special periods like holidays. It's a bit annoying not having a full 12-month view, but I also like the fact that because it starts at some key event, then it usually crosses the year boundary. I tend to use these as future planning rather than recording events, and if it gets messy with too much rubbing out or crossing out, then I'll just start a new one from current (or occasionally a couple of weeks back) and put a note on the old page linking to the page number with the new calendar, and a note on the new one linking to the last.
k__ 9mo ago
Right now, I'm using a Gantt chart to manage my travels. Probably a bit overkill, since the locations only "overlap" one day max, but I like the clear spacing.
f_allwein 9mo ago
> In Apple Calendar it's not possible to see the full year, and still have some visibility into which events are happening on the individual days It‘s weird in general how tools/ websites seem to avoid putting too much information on a screen (see also: event listings, …). Why is that? Most people have big screens nowadays, so it would be feasible to have a view like the one described here, at least for desktop calendars.
- mrgoldenbrown 9mo ago
  So much of the modern web is designed in service to ad revenue. If you optimize a website for usefulness you are losing ad revenue. Every time we force you to click to see another month/week/paragraph we make money.
- WorldMaker 9mo ago
  Some of that is building "mobile-first". If every app needs to be easy to use on small screens with big touch targets first/foremost/always, then anything that takes time to develop and only makes sense for a demographic "desktop users with an ultrawide and effectively all the screen space in the world" gets deprioritized simply because it's a smaller audience; no real malice intended in such cases just over-prioritizing the "needs of the many" over "the desires of a privileged few".
haskman 9mo ago
I use this to generate a yearly calendar PDF for my eink device - https://recalendar.me/ https://recalendar.me/. It generates beautiful pages with internal linking, has support configuring the format, adding/removing sections, and also for uploading ICS files for holidays and such. And it runs entirely within your browser.
cratermoon 9mo ago
timeanddate's calendar generator is great. One thing I've done is generate my monthly calendar and use it as a background for my desktop. With a large enough monitor I suspect a full yearly calendar would work as well.
anonymous344 9mo ago
google calendar really sucks, but it's like cancer, can't get rid of it it has 4 week view, but cannot slide the weeks without manually changing the url. at the end of the month, cannot see the next few weeks, which sucks. Any tampermonkey to make it scrollable freely vertically??

106 points by dewey 9mo ago

I have a simpler problem - I want a yearly calendar app (for Android) that just shows the yearly calendar (for any year), nothing else (no events, no reminders, no anything). Any app I find seems to disappear from the Play Store after a couple years. Bonus: show the weeks vertically.

carefulfungi 9mo ago
https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/cal.1.html https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/cal.1.html
- jrgd 9mo ago
  I second cal! Also I find bsdmainutils’s calendar quite amazing in its simplicity
- ralferoo 9mo ago
  Haha, I talked about my bullet journal approach, but there is one time I always use cal... When I've resigned from a job, I'll always the output from cal, format it to full page in word in Courier, and grey out all the non-working days, and days before now and days after my last day in the job. And then print it out and cross off each day until I leave like an advent calendar! I've had this ritual for the last 6 jobs, going back to the early 2000s when I quit a job I really hated and literally looking forward to crossing off every single day was what kept me sane in the (3 month) notice period.
heresie-dabord 9mo ago
Package: ncal Source: bsdmainutils Maintainer: Debian Bsdmainutils Team [...] Description-en: display a calendar and the date of Easter [...] This utility displays a simple calendar in a traditional or an alternative and more advanced layout, and the date of Easter. And here is a Bash script that runs ncal to show weeks vertically. https://github.com/viviparous/showcal https://github.com/viviparous/showcal
oneeyedpigeon 9mo ago
Re: bonus, are you asking for 52 columns and 7 rows?
- bananaflag 9mo ago
  No. 3 months per row (so 4 rows). Within each month the weeks should be shown vertically (this was common when I was a kid, now even a google image search for yearly calendar shows only horizontal weeks).
thrtythreeforty 9mo ago
Probably, the reason they disappear is that this is the sort of "finished software" that Google makes it very infuriating to keep on the store. On Android you can build an APK like this and it will literally work unmodified for a decade. Google can't stand that and makes you make changes to keep up with shifting policies.

3eb7988a1663 9mo ago

I like a version of this[0] where the weekdays are aligned. [0] https://neatnik.net/calendar/?layout=aligned-weekdays https://neatnik.net/calendar/?layout=aligned-weekdays

Magi604 9mo ago
This is such a great layout, thank you for bringing it to my attention!
dataengineer56 9mo ago
Is there a way to get rid of the text box overlay or does it just disappear when you print it?
- lnenad 9mo ago
  It disappears when you print!
dewey 9mo ago
That one kind of sparked the idea again when I saw it on HN, but it didn't have an easy way to add public holidays / personal calendars.
adriand 9mo ago
On the subject of unusual calendars, I helped a friend make a calendar / digital art project that has a completely alternative month view: https://turnturnturn.me/ https://turnturnturn.me/
- anonymous344 9mo ago
  now it's the last day of the month, any way to see the next month?
eddyg 9mo ago
This one is very customizable: https://github.com/abetusk/neatocal https://github.com/abetusk/neatocal

tianqi 9mo ago

Our local MP (I'm in Sydney) distributed a piece of magnetic calendars to every household, which can be attached to the refrigerator. All the public holidays are already marked, and I mark my own special ones with a highlighter. It's really useful, as long as you don't mind seeing the MP's photo every day.

absynth 9mo ago
Put a photo of someone important there instead.
- JSR_FDED 9mo ago
  How are you going to remember the birthday of that important person?
  - absynth 9mo ago
    I'd have already used the year-at-once calendar and put a little photo on their day. Do you need further instructions?

golem14 9mo ago

I hate to be that guy, but why not use pscal ? It has all you want, plus moon phases! It's admittedly harder to find these days, and someone should rewrite it in a decent language, but here it is: https://www.panix.com/~mbh/pscal/ https://www.panix.com/~mbh/pscal/

heresie-dabord 9mo ago
And I also hate to be that guy but pscal... > someone should rewrite it in a decent language was coded in BAGS (bash, awk, grep, sed) and Postscript circa 1987 [1], and it's still working almost 40 years later in 2026 ! Perhaps it was in fact coded decently. And licensed decently as well. ^_^ [1] AUTHOR: Patrick Wood Copyright (C) 1987 by Pipeline Associates, Inc. Permission is granted to modify and distribute this free of charge.
- golem14 9mo ago
  Well, I sort of agree, it’s a thing of beauty;) and yes, still works like a champ. It’s hard to maintain though unless you really know your BAGS well. Before vibe coding, I had tried to rewrite it in python, I believe, and it turned out not to be easier to read at all… but then I got sidetracked and put the project aside. In my defense, pcal is a rewrite in c and seems horribly complex in comparison. Maybe I should try to finish it. I hope Pat Wood won’t mind.

dandersch 9mo ago

> gave that task to Claude and within 15 minutes I had a working userscript Hate to say it but you can just tell an LLM to make the calendar for you as an html artifact that includes a print view. It can also add a .ics export. Of course you should go over the dates and holidays to see if it got them right.

dewey 9mo ago
Yea I've thought about it and looked into some pre-made calendar components too but then I realized this will still take me longer to get small things like margins, font etc. right and it will just be yet another coding project on my pile of projects ;)

chokolad 9mo ago

Hey.com calendar has recently shipped a very nice year view https://world.hey.com/michelleharjani/building-hey-calendar-s-year-view-2e08d77d https://world.hey.com/michelleharjani/building-hey-calendar-...

kenrick95 9mo ago

I used to save Timeanddate's calendar as HTML and adjust them so they fit A4 paper perfectly (also like to remove their logo oops), but have moved on to generating my own: https://kenrick95.github.io/calendar/ https://kenrick95.github.io/calendar/ Suprisingly CSS Grid is perfect on my use case :)

matsemann 9mo ago

I love https://www.timeanddate.com https://www.timeanddate.com , they have surprisingly much nice content. Lots of stuff probably possible to find elsewhere, but it's a nice collection of utility. - Use their calendars all the time for various planning or visualizations. Like before exams I used to print one out, mark each exam, and work backward which days I would study for which subject. - The astronomy stuff is super useful. https://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/night/ https://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/night/ and it runs great on a phone. Aka I can be outside and use this page to know exactly what I'm looking at in the sky, or use it to plan to see what will be visible tonight. - I have a simple timer counting down to our planned vacation. Just fun to go to the tab and daydream. - When various holidays or red days are. Especially those that move and aren't normally marked on a calendar. Like when this and that part of Norway has their winter break.

i_have_to_speak 9mo ago

You might like this static full year planner version: https://pgdash.io/2026 https://pgdash.io/2026

tmpid 9mo ago

I love the calendar format from https://davidseah.com/node/compact-calendar/ https://davidseah.com/node/compact-calendar/

arch_rust 9mo ago
I found that over the holidays and wrote a cli version! https://github.com/wcampbell0x2a/compact-calendar-cli https://github.com/wcampbell0x2a/compact-calendar-cli
- tmpid 9mo ago
  That's awesome! thanks for sharing it :)

weeb 9mo ago

Interesting how different people's brains work. I personally cannot mentally parse a month-based calendar - the distribution of weeks and weekends is far too variable. I print one of these in A3 every year [0] - easy to see at a glance how many weekends are booked up, any gaps where you need to plan something to look forward to, how many weeks of work you can slot in before a particular commitment, etc. Interesting I've never found the same concept anywhere else. [0] https://www.calendarpedia.co.uk/download/calendar-2025-portrait-rolling.pdf https://www.calendarpedia.co.uk/download/calendar-2025-portr...

matsemann 9mo ago
Someone once collected how people visualize the year and wrote about it here: https://nrkbeta.no/2018/01/01/this-is-what-the-year-actually-looks-like/ https://nrkbeta.no/2018/01/01/this-is-what-the-year-actually... Quite interesting how people are so different.
ralferoo 9mo ago
I've been a fan of Bullet Journals for a few years. I've never bought any of the official books, just use a 192 page 38 line ruled A4 soft-cover book. For a long time, I just had some "future log" pages (actually I tend to have 3-4 years worth) at the start of each book, where I have 3 months per page so I can drop in important future events (like booking a holiday 12 months out), birthdays etc (although I only copy these forward annually) and then a "month ahead" page at the start of each page where I had a line per day. I found that I wasn't really using most of these lines though because mostly only the weekends were useful for me. I switched to having a 9 month-view where I have a line per week, and the left page is the weekend and the right page for weekdays. I pen in the dates for every weekend day, and tend to only fill in the dates on the weekdays when I have something to add on a specific day. I only ever write in pencil on these pages apart from the dates in pen, so blocks can be erased easily, and I tend to use corner square brackets to highlight start and ends of longer special periods like holidays. It's a bit annoying not having a full 12-month view, but I also like the fact that because it starts at some key event, then it usually crosses the year boundary. I tend to use these as future planning rather than recording events, and if it gets messy with too much rubbing out or crossing out, then I'll just start a new one from current (or occasionally a couple of weeks back) and put a note on the old page linking to the page number with the new calendar, and a note on the new one linking to the last.

k__ 9mo ago

Right now, I'm using a Gantt chart to manage my travels. Probably a bit overkill, since the locations only "overlap" one day max, but I like the clear spacing.

f_allwein 9mo ago

> In Apple Calendar it's not possible to see the full year, and still have some visibility into which events are happening on the individual days It‘s weird in general how tools/ websites seem to avoid putting too much information on a screen (see also: event listings, …). Why is that? Most people have big screens nowadays, so it would be feasible to have a view like the one described here, at least for desktop calendars.

mrgoldenbrown 9mo ago
So much of the modern web is designed in service to ad revenue. If you optimize a website for usefulness you are losing ad revenue. Every time we force you to click to see another month/week/paragraph we make money.
WorldMaker 9mo ago
Some of that is building "mobile-first". If every app needs to be easy to use on small screens with big touch targets first/foremost/always, then anything that takes time to develop and only makes sense for a demographic "desktop users with an ultrawide and effectively all the screen space in the world" gets deprioritized simply because it's a smaller audience; no real malice intended in such cases just over-prioritizing the "needs of the many" over "the desires of a privileged few".

haskman 9mo ago

I use this to generate a yearly calendar PDF for my eink device - https://recalendar.me/ https://recalendar.me/. It generates beautiful pages with internal linking, has support configuring the format, adding/removing sections, and also for uploading ICS files for holidays and such. And it runs entirely within your browser.

cratermoon 9mo ago

timeanddate's calendar generator is great. One thing I've done is generate my monthly calendar and use it as a background for my desktop. With a large enough monitor I suspect a full yearly calendar would work as well.

anonymous344 9mo ago

google calendar really sucks, but it's like cancer, can't get rid of it it has 4 week view, but cannot slide the weeks without manually changing the url. at the end of the month, cannot see the next few weeks, which sucks. Any tampermonkey to make it scrollable freely vertically??