Chronic

Chronic is a natural language date-time parser for the command-line.

Dependencies

• Crystal
• date (for date input formats)

Installation

make install

Editor integration

• Kakoune

Usage

[time = now] | chronic [format = %F %T]
  [--input | -i INPUT]
  [--days | -d DAYS] [--hours | -h HOURS] [--minutes | -m MINUTES] [--seconds | -s SECONDS]
  [--format | -f FORMAT] [--separator | -j SEPARATOR]
  [--sleep | -z]
  [--command | -x COMMAND]
  [--help]

Syntax

<time> [+|plus] [relative-time] | chronic [format]
<start-time> [..|-|→|to] <end-time> | chronic [format]
<time> [::] <relative-time> | chronic [format]

Examples

Simple:

echo today | chronic
# 2020-02-02 19:00:00

Increment a day:

echo 2020-02-02 + tomorrow | chronic '%F'
# 2020-02-03

Same with --input option:

echo 2020-02-02 | chronic '%F' --input '%s + tomorrow'
# 2020-02-03

Create a new diary:

echo 01 January to 31 December | chronic '# %F' > ~/documents/diary/2020.md

~/documents/diary/2020.md

# 2020-01-01
[…]
# 2020-12-31

Grep things to do over the next 7 days:

grep $(chronic --input 'today → 7 days' 'TODO.+%F' --separator '|')

Regex:

TODO.+2020-02-02|TODO.+2020-02-03|TODO.+2020-02-04|TODO.+2020-02-05|TODO.+2020-02-06|TODO.+2020-02-07|TODO.+2020-02-08

Set up an alarm:

echo Tomorrow 09:00 AM | chronic --sleep
mpv -shuffle ~/music

Configuration

alias p=echo
alias cr=chronic

Options

--input / -i INPUT
  Set text input (Default: %s).  You can map stdin content with %s.

--days / -d DAYS
  Configure step in days (Default: 1).

--hours / -h HOURS
  Configure step in hours.

--minutes / -m MINUTES
  Configure step in minutes.

--seconds / -s SECONDS
  Configure step in seconds.

--format / -f FORMAT
  Set text format (Default: %s).

--separator / -j SEPARATOR
  Configure separator (Default: ␤).

--sleep / -z
  Sleep for the specified time span.

--command / -x COMMAND
  Execute command when the specified time passed.  Requires --sleep.

--help
  Display a help message and quit.

References

• Time::Format
• Date input formats