45. Calendar and Contacts

The Calendar keeps your appointments, the Contacts program the people you deal with. Both store their data in open standard formats that phones and other programs read as well.

Calendar

The Calendar keeps your appointments and To Do items, reminds you of them, and exchanges them with the Mailer and other calendar programs. It is the CDE Calendar, with its four views, its Appointment Editor and its reminders, stored in the standard iCalendar format.

Click the Calendar in the Front Panel, which shows today's date, or start amade-calendar.

The views

The buttons Day, Week, Month and Year in the tool bar switch the view; ◀, Today and ▶ step back and forward by a day, a week, a month or a year. View → Go To Date… jumps anywhere.

View	What it shows
Day	The day hour by hour, with a small calendar of three months beside it. Days with appointments are bold there.
Week	A column for each day with its appointments, and below a grid of the week with the taken hours shaded.
Month	The month with the appointments in the day boxes.
Year	The twelve months. A click on a month or a day opens it.

Appointments

Double-click a day, or an hour in the Day view, to open the Appointment Editor for it; double-click an appointment to change it. Enter the Date, Start and End, and in What what it is about; the first line is what the views show. Leave Start empty for an appointment without a time, such as a birthday. Then click Insert. Change saves changes to the selected appointment, Delete removes it.

The small calendar button next to each date field opens a date chooser.

More shows the rest:

• Reminders: Beep, Flash (the Calendar window draws attention), Popup (a message) and Mail (a message to yourself, ready to send in the Mailer), each a chosen time before the appointment.
• Occurs: once, daily, weekly, every two weeks, monthly by date or by weekday, yearly, Monday to Friday and more, with For the number of times (empty for ever). When you change or delete one appointment of a series, the Calendar asks whether you mean This One, Forward (this one and all later ones) or All.
• Privacy: what others may see when the calendar is printed for them: time and text, the time only, or nothing.

Reminders appear while the Calendar runs, so leave it open, on another workspace if you like.

To Do items

Edit → To Do… (or To Do in the tool bar) opens the To Do Editor: a due date, a description and Completed. View → To Do List… lists them with a check box each, and can show all, the pending or the completed ones.

Finding and listing

View → Find… searches the text of the appointments, six months back and ahead, or with Search all the whole calendar. View → Appointment List… lists the appointments of the view's period in a table.

With the Mailer and other calendars

• An .ics file, from a mail attachment, the File Manager or another calendar program, opens in the Calendar and its appointments are added. Files can also be dropped on the Calendar window.
• In a mail with an appointment, Schedule in Calendar adds it.
• In the Appointment Editor, Mail… opens the Mailer with the appointment as the message, and the Drag Appointment icon carries the appointment out to the File Manager or a mail as an .ics file.

Birthdays of the people in Contacts appear on their day, "Birthday: Anna Berger (40)", with the age when the year of birth is known. They are not part of your calendar: to change one, change the contact. A double-click on a birthday offers to open Contacts. The Mail To address of a Mail reminder is completed from your contacts as in the Mailer.

An export of your Google Calendar opens without losses: repeating appointments with their exceptions, appointments spanning several days and times in other time zones.

Printing

File → Print Current View (Ctrl+P) prints what is on the screen. File → Print… chooses what to print, day, week, month or year, the appointment list or the To Do list, the dates and the number of copies.

Options

File → Options… has a Category menu: Editor Defaults for new appointments, Display Settings (the hours of the Day and Week views, 12- or 24-hour time, the view to start with, and whether birthdays from Contacts are shown), Date Format, Printer Settings and Language.

Planned

One place for all your accounts, shared by the Mailer and the Calendar; showing other calendars next to your own (Google, Nextcloud and other CalDAV servers); keeping your calendar in step with a server both ways, which also lets you share a calendar with another person.

Under the hood

The whole calendar is one iCalendar file (RFC 5545), ~/.local/share/amadeos/calendar/calendar.ics, the options are in ~/.config/amadeos/calendar/calendar.conf. What the Calendar does not know itself, such as places or attendees from other programs, it keeps and writes back unchanged.

Contacts

Contacts is your address book: people and organizations with their phone numbers, e-mail and postal addresses, birthdays, groups, notes and a photo. It is in the Text & Office and Mail & Internet drawers of the Front Panel; or start amade-contacts.

The window

The window has three columns:

• On the left, All Contacts, your groups and Birthdays, which lists everyone whose birthday is in the next 30 days, the soonest first. The numbers say how many contacts each has.
• In the middle, the contacts, with their photo or initials and an e-mail address or phone number below the name. View → Sort by First Name or Sort by Last Name sets the order.
• On the right, the card of the selected contact. Next to a phone number is Call, next to an e-mail address Write, next to an address Map, next to a website Open.

Search (Ctrl+F) finds contacts by any part of what is on their card: the name, the organization, an e-mail address, a city, a group or the notes. Phone numbers are found by their digits, so 5550123 finds +49 170 555 0123, and accents do not count: muller finds Müller. Down moves from the search field into the list, Esc clears the search.

Adding and changing contacts

New Contact (Ctrl+N, the first tool bar button) opens an empty card; Edit Contact (Ctrl+E, or a double-click on a contact) the selected one.

• First, middle and last name, a title such as Dr. and a suffix. The Display name is what the list shows; it follows the name as you type until you write your own, for example a nickname or a company.
• Phone, E-mail, Address and Website take as many entries as you need: + Add phone and so on adds one, the – button removes it, and the menu in front says whether it is mobile, home, work, fax or other.
• Birthday: a date such as 1986-11-14, or --11-14 if you do not know the year. The small calendar button opens a date chooser.
• Groups: tick the groups the contact belongs to, or write new ones into New, separated by commas. A contact can be in several groups; a group exists as long as a contact is in it.
• Photo… chooses a picture; it is cut square and kept small.

Save keeps the contact, Cancel or Esc forgets the changes. Delete (Del) removes the selected contacts after asking.

Writing, calling, finding the way

• Write a mail (Ctrl+M) opens a new message in the Mailer to the selected contacts; select several, or a whole group with Ctrl+A, for a mail to all of them. Write on the card writes to that one address.
• Call hands the number to a program for phone calls, if one is installed, such as a softphone. Without one, the number is copied, so you can paste it where you need it.
• Map shows the address on OpenStreetMap in the web browser.
• Edit → Copy (Ctrl+C) copies the selected contacts as "Name <address>" lines, which you can paste into the To field of a mail. Copy as vCard (Ctrl+Shift+C) copies them as a business card for other programs, and Paste vCard (Ctrl+V) adds the business cards on the clipboard as contacts.

Bringing your contacts along

Contacts → Import… (Ctrl+I) reads contacts from another program. You can also drop a file on the window, or double-click a .vcf file in the File Manager.

Coming from	Export there as	Import here
Android phone, iPhone, Thunderbird, Evolution, macOS Contacts	vCard (.vcf)	as it is
Google Contacts	Export → Google CSV or vCard	as it is
Outlook	File → Open & Export → Import/Export → Export to a file → Comma Separated Values	as it is, also a German Outlook
Thunderbird (older versions)	Tools → Export → LDIF	as it is
A table of your own (Excel, LibreOffice)	Save as CSV	check the columns

The import window shows the format and the encoding it recognised; if umlauts look wrong, choose another Encoding. For tables it shows each column with an example and what it becomes: First name, E-mail (work), Birthday and so on. Click into the Field column to change it, or choose (ignore).

Contacts whose e-mail address is already in your address book are merged with the known contact: new phone numbers, addresses and groups are added, nothing is overwritten. Choose Always add as new contacts if you prefer them separate. With Add to the group the new contacts go into a group such as Imported 2026-10-23, so you can look through them and delete the group's contacts again if the import was not what you wanted.

Contacts → Export… (Ctrl+Shift+E) saves the selected contacts, or all that the list shows, for another program: vCard 4.0, vCard 3.0 for older phones and programs, CSV for Google Contacts, CSV for Outlook or LDIF for Thunderbird.

Planned

Inviting attendees from your contacts in the Calendar; keeping your contacts in step with a server (Nextcloud and other CardDAV servers) from the program itself; merging two contacts by hand.

Under the hood

Every contact is a vCard 4.0 file (RFC 6350) of its own in ~/.local/share/amadeos/contacts/personal/, named after the contact's unique ID; the file displayname holds the name of the address book, and further folders next to personal are further address books. This is the layout that vdirsyncer uses, so it can already keep the folder in step with a CardDAV server. Contacts writes each file anew as a whole and only changes the properties you edited; what other programs put into a card stays. When the window becomes active, it reads files that other programs changed. The sort order is in ~/.config/amadeos/contacts/contacts.properties.