Calendaring vs. Nextcloud.

Now that I finally (yay!) exported my calendars from Google Calendar, imported them to Nextcloud and fully made the switch to Nextcloud calendar…

Okay a little side track here. My typical use of Gmail and the Google Calendar lately has been opening them to search for something in the past — times before going to Nextcloud. So clearly, the way to fully uncloud myself is to actually migrate my old stuff to the new systems. In this context, calendar is the easy thing. Email will take longer because of the size. Side track over.

…I have a shortlist of stuff I want to see in Nextcloud, calendaring-wise:

1. I want to be able to create an event from an email. I don’t need any smart date discovery features here; all I need is a button that will open a new calendar event and copy the contents of the email in the Description field. Currently this is not possible in any of the Nextcloud email apps.
2. I want Location field in a calendar event to be a map search link. Ideally (but that might be overthinking it, definetely not minimum viable) I also want to configure my mapping provider, so let’s say an option in Settings to choose between Apple Maps, OpenStreetMap, or Google Maps. Then it’s really simple: based on the chosen provider, a simple formula using e.g. “https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=%s” and the value in Location of the event, to look it up on the map.
3. I want hotkeys, or at least a “New event” button (and maybe one hotkey for it?) that lets me enter a new event without clicking somewhere in the calendar. Ultimately, I would be thrilled to enter events exclusively from the keyboard, with no use of the mouse. Google Calendar had this… then they over-engineered it and by now it lost its efficiency to it, leading me back to mouse usage.

Now, these are minor annoyances. Calendar in Nextcloud is working fine, I have 4 calendars mastered here for myself, and subscribe to another 5 (kids’ school, work calendar, etc.). The calendar app on my phone is lean and syncs perfectly with my cloud.

Another great thing is: now that I actually made myself think of these to write them down, I can go and look on Github — I’m sure someone has raised these exact requests. Then, I can go to Bountysource and set up a bounty for them. Or just change the apps myself.

Free software is awesome.

(Featured image: my own photo from my sunset run 2 days ago. Enjoy.)