GNU Emacs Manual - Diary

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## The Diary

The Emacs diary keeps track of appointments or other events on a daily basis, in conjunction with the calendar. To use the diary feature, you must first create a diary file containing a list of events and their dates. Then Emacs can automatically pick out and display the events for today, for the immediate future, or for any specified date.

By default, Emacs uses ``~/diary'` as the diary file. This is the same file that the `calendar` utility uses. A sample ``~/diary'` file is:

    12/22/1988  Twentieth wedding anniversary!!
    &1/1.       Happy New Year!
    10/22       Ruth's birthday.
    * 21, *:    Payday
    Tuesday--weekly meeting with grad students at 10am
             Supowit, Shen, Bitner, and Kapoor to attend.
    1/13/89     Friday the thirteenth!!
    &thu 4pm    squash game with Lloyd.
    mar 16      Dad's birthday
    April 15, 1989 Income tax due.
    &* 15       time cards due.

This example uses extra spaces to align the event descriptions of most of the entries. Such formatting is purely a matter of taste.

Although you probably will start by creating a diary manually, Emacs provides a number of commands to let you view, add, and change diary entries.

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