The danger in scoping out fun little applications from time to time is that sometimes you end up discarding something you liked, because you find something you like even more.

I enjoy working with calcurse, and its easy learning curve and menu-driven system were some of the first things I liked about it. It’s simple, it’s intuitive, its colorful and it’s customizable. All of those things are huge advantages when discussing console-based applications … which most people consider to be anything-but.

And then I tried out wyrd, which is the front-end for the remind schedule and alarm program, and while my initial response was less than enthusiastic, I must admit I am using it full-time now. The things I disliked or found unnecessary at first — like it’s ability to track appointments and events down to the minute — now seem like huge benefits. Now I can not only see a visual representation of the events on a given day, but I can see schedule conflicts, overlapping times and color-coded degrees of “busy-ness.”

Add to that the general ease of adding and editing events (it’s just a text file with a few templates you can manually change) and the straightforward program configuration (the .wyrdrc file is painfully easy to figure out) and the fact that you can practically type in your appointment in plain old English (things like “Dentist appointment 10:15 next Fri”) and wyrd will add it to your schedule without blinking.

And hotkeys, and jumping between days, and zooming for quarter-hour precision, and weekly schedules and monthly planning calendars, and day-to-day reminders, and cutting and pasting, and. …

Well, it’s hard to overlook that many features all in the same program. I like calcurse and I don’t look down on it in the least, but after a few minutes with wyrd, plus a slightly hefty calendar to manage, there was no contest. This one also falls into the “keepers” category, friends. 🙂