A timeline view for your iCal feeds.

• Project page — https://heracl.es/kalendes
• Live instance — https://kalendes.vercel.app

Kalendes (Greek καλένδες, from Latin Kalendae) were the first day of each month in the Roman calendar — the day the month’s days were called out and debts logged in the kalendarium, the account-book that gives us the word “calendar,” fell due. The Greeks kept no Kalends of their own, so at the Greek Kalendes — Latin ad Kalendas Graecas, Greek στις ελληνικές καλένδες — became a byword for never, a date that never comes.

What it does

Shows your calendars side-by-side as horizontal rows along a continuous timeline. Pinch-zoom from a single month out to two years, or drop into a 1-week hour grid (1W) for a Google-Calendar-style day-by-day view across two timezones. Built for spotting overlap and travel across multiple feeds at once. Black-on-paper, e-ink friendly. Reads any ICS feed (Google, iCloud, Outlook, Fastmail, Nextcloud).

How it works

/kalendes is a static Svelte 5 + Vite app. It pulls iCal feeds through a tiny Vercel proxy (sandboxed CORS, cache-friendly), parses them with ical.js, and renders pills with a custom lane-assignment layout. Find-and-replace rules let you rename, recolour, and filter events. Each calendar carries a type (None / Events / Holidays / Observances / Announcements / Guests) and an optional travel tag (international or local). Settings, feeds, and rules live in localStorage and move between devices via share links or the paste-config flow. Calendars can also be imported from .ics files into local, editable lanes (see Import & export). Offline-first: a service worker caches the shell and the last good feed responses. Events are cached locally for instant display on load, with background refresh.

Week view (1W)

The 1W toolbar button (left of the zoom row) switches into a week grid: days as columns, hours down the side, all feeds merged onto one surface. It sits outside the pinch/wheel zoom progression and is toggled on its own — tap 1W again to return to the previous zoom, or double-tap it to clear the day marker and jump back to today.

• Two timezones side-by-side — the frozen left gutter shows the hour axis for the two zones set in Settings (top/bottom), plus your local zone when it differs. Country codes label each in the header corner, and the live local time rides the now-line.
• Day/night shading — the working-hours window (Time & date → morning/evening limits) is drawn per zone: the page colour marks where both zones are working (the overlap), a light tint where one is off, a darker tint where both are off. Dashed lines mark each zone’s morning/evening edges; sun/moon glyphs sit in the gutter.
• The day marker is shared across zooms — set it by clicking a date header (in any view); switching between the timeline and 1W keeps it in view.
• Navigation & editing — arrow keys move a focus ring between events and days (Enter opens, Shift+Enter selects); double-click an empty slot to draft an hour-long event there, or drag down the slot to set its length (on touch, hold first, then drag; let go without dragging for an hour); drag a local event to reschedule it; double-click an event to copy its details; a mouse hover shows a crosshair with the exact time. It opens each session with the whole day in view; pinch or Ctrl/⌘-scroll changes the row height. Horizontal scroll is bounded by the past/future-months setting.
• Overlaps and long events — an event that starts half an hour or more after one it overlaps is drawn over it, indented a step, so both titles stay readable; events starting together share the column side by side. A timed event running over several days shows on each of them.
• Long events keep their name in view — an event 10 hours or longer pins its title under the header while you scroll the hours past it.
• Busy all-day strip — a week with many all-day events caps the strip at a few rows, with a +N under each crowded day; tap it to show every row, and the … left in its place to fold them back. A bar crowded out of the capped strip still shows on the days it has to itself, with a dashed, square edge where it is cut short.

Event details

Tapping any event opens a detail card: its title, the date with the localized weekday (a single day inline, a multi-day span on its own row), start/end times and duration, location, and description. Side arrows down each edge page prev/next through that calendar’s events without leaving the card, and a { } toggle reveals the raw iCal with any matching find-and-replace rules highlighted in the rule’s own style. When the event’s calendar runs on another timezone than yours (set on the calendar, or read from its feed), a fainter line under the times gives the event’s own — 20:00 — 21:00 JST · Tokyo, JP, with +1D when that lands on another day, or just the zone for an all-day event. The { } button shows how many rules apply to the event in place of its #, and rounds its corner like the event’s pill when any do. Draft and imported events gain an Edit button (Cancel or the back gesture returns to the card, as it does from the raw view); every event can be downloaded as .ics or copied. A quick mouse-hover shows the same summary as a lightweight preview.

Events a feed marks as cancelled (STATUS:CANCELLED) are drawn struck through, unless a rule gives them a style of its own, and the card says so. They never hatch a day, whatever the calendar’s Block setting, though a rule’s own Block still applies; the flag carries through .ics import and export of local lanes.

Quick add

c, the + on the Draft row, or a click on an empty 1W slot opens the event form. Its title doubles as a one-line quick entry: type Lunch w/ Ana fri 13-14 @Taverna and the date, times and location fill in as you type; Save keeps Lunch w/ Ana as the title. Repeating events imported from an .ics file edit as one: a change applies to every repeat; to skip one day, select that one and delete it in the tray. Dragging one repeat moves just that one, as a separate event.

A time makes the event timed; a date alone keeps the form’s kind — all-day, or timed when you opened it from a 1W slot. Fields the title is filling are drawn in the accent colour. They stay editable: change one by hand and it stops following the title, and the title keeps those words. Editing an existing event leaves the title alone.

Search

/ opens the search bar. It matches titles, notes and locations, both as a feed sent them and as your rules rename them, across every calendar that isn’t hidden — a collapsed calendar shows its match count on its row and opens when you step onto one of its matches. Upcoming events only, unless the clock button includes the past.

Operators combine with plain words (dentist in:home after:2026-11) or stand alone to list everything they match. Their dates take every quick add date form, plus a bare month or year (2027-03, march, 2027); after: or before: also lifts the upcoming-only limit.

• Mark a span to scope it — while the day marker spans several days, only events in those days match; the count shows the span’s length.
• Go to a date — a query that is just a date (2027-03, march, 9 oct, next fri, +2w) shows the date in place of the count; a pause in typing scrolls there, and Enter also marks that day. Likewise a pause scrolls to the first upcoming match, and Enter opens its collapsed row.
• Select every match — the checkbox adds all matches to the tray, to copy, download or move together; once they are all selected it shows checked, and tapping it again deselects them.

Rescheduling local events

Events in local lanes (the Draft and imported .ics) can be dragged to a new date; events from URL feeds stay read-only, since the next refresh would overwrite any change.

• Timeline zooms — drag a pill to move it by whole days (a timed event keeps its clock time); drag the left or right edge of an all-day pill to resize it.
• 1W — drag a timed event across days and hours (snapping to 15 minutes), or its bottom edge to change its duration. Dropping a timed event on the all-day strip makes it all-day; dropping an all-day event on the hour grid gives it a one-hour slot.
• A dashed ghost and a live readout show where the event will land. Esc cancels. On touch, hold the event first, then drag; a quick swipe still scrolls, and a hold released without moving selects the event as before.
• Moves happen on the wall clock of the display timezone, so an event moved across a daylight-saving change keeps its time.
• From the keyboard: Alt ←/→ moves the focused local event a day; in 1W Alt ↑/↓ moves it 15 minutes.
• After each move or resize the tray says what changed, with an UNDO button; Ctrl/⌘ Z undoes too. Several moves undo one at a time, newest first, the bar naming the next one each time. It stays until you do something else — tap elsewhere, press another key, or CANCEL — and the undo history ends once the lane is edited some other way.

Events tray

The status bar along the bottom (or the left edge, per the Tray setting) doubles as the agenda view. Collapsed, it shows what’s next from your untyped (Type: None) linked calendars: the next event and how soon it starts, or — while one is under way — NOW and its time left, until the next is ten minutes off. Cancelled events are skipped; tap the line to open the event. Next Event in Settings → Look & feel picks what it shows: Everything, All Day (all-day events only), Short (timed events only) or None. Long-press an event — or press Shift+Enter on a keyboard-focused one — to start selecting; selected events collect in the tray as structured rows that can be copied out as a TSV table or downloaded as .ics, and events living in local lanes can be moved, copied, or deleted across lanes from there.

Keyboard shortcuts

Bare-key shortcuts stay out of the way while typing in a text field; Ctrl/⌘ combos and Esc work everywhere, except Ctrl/⌘ Z, which a text field keeps for its own undo.

Settings

• Look & feel — flavor and scheme (each with Auto and Shake!), spacing, tray side, next events in the status bar, font size, border weight, motion, and haptics
• Time & date — language, date and time formats, the two timezones shown side-by-side in the 1W week view, a DST override, past/future months visible (also bounds how far the 1W week view scrolls), and morning/evening limits (hide timed events outside a chosen hour range, and drive the 1W day/night shading)
• Rules — find & replace rules: rename, recolour, or hide events by keyword
• Calendars — add, reorder, and configure ICS feeds. You can also paste a Google Calendar share or embed link (e.g. https://calendar.google.com/calendar/embed?src=…) and it’s converted to that calendar’s ICS feed automatically — the calendar must be shared publicly, otherwise Google returns a 404 and the feed shows an error explaining how to enable public sharing.
• Refresh interval — 30 min / 1 h / 4 h

Themes & flavors

Appearance is two independent axes: a flavor (the colour palette) and a scheme (Auto / Light / Dark — Auto follows the system). To flip between light and dark without opening Settings, hold the gear icon for about half a second and let go (a tick marks the moment, and a sun or moon briefly replaces the icon); holding on to 3s locks kiosk mode instead. Both axes also offer Shake!, which picks at random: a fresh choice each launch, and another every time you shake the device. Set just one axis to Shake! to keep the other pinned. Shaking needs a device with an accelerometer, so it works on phones and tablets (including installed Chrome/Edge web apps and iOS home-screen web apps, where iOS asks for motion access on your next tap) but not on most desktops — and never in desktop Firefox, which doesn’t expose motion data to web pages at all. Where shaking isn’t available, Shake! still re-rolls on every launch. Each flavor defines four tokens, in a light and a dark variant: --paper-color (the page), --ink-color (text and lines), --accent-color, and --link-color; every other colour in the UI derives from those. Each flavor pairs its accent with a contrasting link colour — often another part of the namesake plant (pepper’s red with a pimento green, juniper’s green needle with a blue-violet berry), sometimes just a complementary hue (sage’s violet flower with a deep blue, cinnamon’s brick red with a deep pink). Links rest at the ink colour and reveal --link-color on hover/active/focus. In the swatches below the square is the paper and the ⁂ stars are the ink, accent, and link colours. Each swatch links to its SVG source in docs/flavors/, where the shapes carry the token names as ids.

Flavor	Light	Dark
Pepper (default)
Juniper
Bergamot
Rose
Cinnamon
Sage

Import & export

The Configuration section’s Import button (and long-press to paste from the clipboard) accepts two kinds of input, auto-detected from the content:

• A JSON config — the format produced by Export — replaces your current calendars, rules, and settings. Use it to move a full setup between devices, alongside share links.
• An .ics calendar file — adds its events as a new local lane, named after the calendar (X-WR-CALNAME), the file, or the import date. A local lane behaves like the built-in Draft: its events are editable, stored in localStorage, and not synced to any URL. Repeating events stay repeating: each is kept as one event with its rule (RRULE), skipped days and timezone, so it repeats past the visible window, edits as one and exports as it came. A rule finer than days (hourly, BYHOUR, week numbers) is expanded to fixed copies within the visible window instead; a changed single occurrence becomes an event of its own. No link to the source file is kept. Each .ics you import becomes its own lane, and any imported lane can be deleted.

In Calendars, each row carries a marker that distinguishes local lanes (Draft and imported .ics) from URL-backed feeds: an unlink glyph for local, not-synced lanes and a link glyph for linked URL feeds. Each local lane can be exported back to an .ics file from its row. Exports keep each event’s UID and carry a SEQUENCE / LAST-MODIFIED that go up with every edit, so re-importing an updated export into another calendar app updates the events instead of duplicating them. A small dot on the download button marks a lane edited since you last exported it (in this session).

Share links

The Share button in Settings → Configuration copies a link (or opens the native share sheet) that carries the whole setup in the URL itself — nothing is uploaded anywhere: the linked calendars with their names, types, travel tags, and timezones; the find-and-replace rules; a snapshot of the current view (zoom, language, date format, scheme, flavor); and the kiosk PIN if one is set. Hidden calendars are left out, linked and local alike; Export still carries them. The payload is deflate-compressed into a ?s= parameter; if the setup grows past the ~2000-character URL limit the button disables and says so. The date being viewed rides along in the # fragment, so a link also works as a plain “look at this date” pointer even without importing.

Opening a share link brings up the Import shared setup prompt, stating how many calendars and rules it carries, with three choices:

• Replace yours — swap your calendars and rules for the shared ones.
• Merge — keep everything you have and add only the shared calendars (by URL) and rules you don’t already have.
• Cancel — dismiss; nothing is imported.

Either import also applies the shared view settings, and a link carrying a kiosk PIN locks the app on arrival (see Kiosk mode).

Kiosk mode

For wall displays and shared screens. Long-press the gear icon (~3s) to set a 4-digit PIN; the icon becomes a padlock and the app locks into a read-only view — settings, calendar/rule editing, the events tray, and all downloads/exports are disabled, while browsing, search, and collapsing/expanding calendar rows still work. Long-press the padlock (~3s) to bring up the unlock modal; the correct PIN clears the lock. The PIN survives reloads (so the screen stays locked), and the Share button produces a share link that, when opened, prompts to import the setup and then lands locked.

Developer & testing

The Reset button in Settings → Configuration normally takes two taps to reset everything to defaults. It also carries a hidden developer shortcut: long-press it (~3s) to reset to defaults and seed a demo dataset — a Draft lane of varied sample events (past/future all-day spans, timed meetings around today, overlaps across categories) plus a second imported test lane — then reload. A confirm dialog guards it, since it replaces your current calendars, rules, and settings. Handy for exercising the timeline, the 1W week grid, and the layout code without wiring up real feeds.

Credit

Dialectic Acheiropoieton of Heracles Papatheodorou and Claude.

MIT License.