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Google Calendar -> calcurse synchronise one way without CalDAV/OAuth2
January 24th, 2019
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calcurse is a nice ncurses calendar, appointment and to-do program for
terminal use... It includes an extremely clunky ALPHA software called
calcurse-caldav to synchronise with CalDAV servers or Google Calendar
(using OAuth2 Authentication).

If, like myself, you have ever used calcurse with Google Calendar, you
may have noticed that calcurse-caldav is indeed alpha software, and
should probably be avoided by all but the most hardcore users and
developers... Fortunately in my case I've found a workaround that suits
me, as I only need to synchronise one-way, from Google to my local
machine. The workaround is simple: many calendars on Google Calendars
have publicly-available addresses in iCal format and some have secret
addresses in iCal format... You can find them by going to
calendar.google.com, click the hamburger (why isn't it a cheeseburger?)
menu at the top-left so that "My calendars" and "Other calendars" are
displayed in the bar on the left. Hover over a calendar you are
interested in and hit the three-dot menu and then "Settings and sharing".
The URLs (if available) will be in the "Integrate calendar section" and
labeled as "Public address in iCal format" and/or "Secret address in iCal
format".

I was able to import my personal calendar, and some holiday calendars
that I follow (en.christian#holiday, en.philippines#holiday,
en-gb.usa#holiday, and en.islamic#holiday).  I could not pull-in
#contacts (birthdays and anniversary dates from Google Contacts, and some
weird legacy crap from Google+ which nobody cares about) and family.

The way I get calcurse to do what I want is via a simple function in my
shell which does the following: sets the windows title (if I'm running in
tmux or some kind of graphical terminal emuilator {xterm}), sets
appropriate file permissions (I don't have anything secret, but I do want
any other users to have to work to snoop on my files, haha!), nukes
almost everything on startup (this is important, because calcurse import
can't tell if an event is a duplicate, and they can pile up rather
quickly), downloads the iCal files from Google, imports the iCal files,
and finally actually runs calcurse.
I had to set ~/calcurse/apts and ~/calcurse/notes/ to symlink to a tmp
directory.

Here's what I came up with in the end:

calcurse() {
echo -ne '\033k'calcurse'\033\\'
umask 027
rm -rf /tmp/calcurse-zachary/
mkdir -p /tmp/calcurse-zachary/notes
wget -q https://SECRETURL /tmp/calcurse-zachary/zach.ics
wget -q http://bit.ly/2FKrneX -O /tmp/calcurse-zachary/christian_holidays
wget -q http://bit.ly2WeQgnO -O /tmp/calcurse-zachary/philippine_holidays
wget -q http://bit.ly/2FNXryq -O /tmp/calcurse-zachary/us_holidays.ics
wget -q http://bit.ly/2RIx0As -O /tmp/calcurse-zachary/islamic_holidays
/usr/bin/calcurse -qi /tmp/calcurse-zachary/zach.ics
/usr/bin/calcurse -qi /tmp/calcurse-zachary/christian_holidays
/usr/bin/calcurse -qi /tmp/calcurse-zachary/philippine_holidays
/usr/bin/calcurse -qi /tmp/calcurse-zachary/us_holidays.ics
/usr/bin/calcurse -qi /tmp/calcurse-zachary/islamic_holidays
/usr/bin/calcurse $@
echo -ne '\033k'sh'\033\\'
}



That shell function will refresh calcurse whenever I open it.... If I
leave it open for days and need an update, I just close it and then open
it again. Easy.
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