Getting Quicksilver iCal syntax right
Terry posted a comment today in an earlier Hawk Wings post about the formal syntax for creating iCal events and to-dos with the Quicksilver iCal plugin. It was news to me; it might be to you too.
Although the iCal plugin does its best to parse the date, time and content from your text string, you can help it along.
The documentation 
for the Quicksilver iCal plugin sets out the correct syntax. For events, it expects your text to look like:
For to-dos:
NB: Those long dashes are actually two hyphens.
Adding exclamation marks increases the priority of the to-do.
UPDATE: As Cooper points out in the comments, you need to enable Quicksilver’s advanced features option to make this work:
You will also find in the documentation some feature requests for the plugin that would be terrific, like the ability to mark to-dos done or add attendees.
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Tags: events, format, iCal, plugins, Productivity, quicksilver, syntax, to dos
September 24th, 2006 at 7:00 am
[...] A while ago we covered Quicksilver plugins for Gmail and Google Calendar, allowing you to send an email or create a new event (respectively) right from within Quicksilver’s interface. If you aren’t a Google Calendar user though, Quicksilver also offers the same kind of plugin for iCal. Somehow I lost this in my bloggable bookmarks, but last month Tim Gaden at Hawk Wings broke down the syntax for adding an event to iCal with this plugin, and it’s really pretty simple. When entering text, the event is written like so: TUAW [...]
September 24th, 2006 at 7:01 am
[...] A while ago we covered Quicksilver plugins for Gmail and Google Calendar, allowing you to send an email or create a new event (respectively) right from within Quicksilver’s interface. If you aren’t a Google Calendar user though, Quicksilver also offers the same kind of plugin for iCal. Somehow I lost this in my bloggable bookmarks, but last month Tim Gaden at Hawk Wings broke down the syntax for adding an event to iCal with this plugin, and it’s really pretty simple. When entering text, the event is written like so: TUAW [...]
September 24th, 2006 at 7:13 am
[...] Jeff Powell joins us today. Fission 1.0 from Rogue Amoeba MacBreak Episode #12 – Quicksilver Add a new iCal event from Quicksilver – also available for Gmail and Google Calendar Mighty Mouse Horizontal Scrolling Trick Burn – Open Source Alternative to Roxio’s Popular Toast Application Business Week on Jonathan Ive [...]
September 26th, 2006 at 12:24 am
love this! is there a way to add a reminder? i tried just typing it in as part of the date/time (ie “reminder 1 hour before”), but it doesn’t seem to register. this would be a great feature if anyone knows the syntax.
thanks,
George
September 29th, 2006 at 2:25 am
To help out folks who are trying to turn on the iCal Plug-In in Quicksilver – you FIRST need to turn on “Enable advanced features” in the QS application preferences, THEN you can see and enable the iCal Plug-In in the list of Plug-ins.
September 29th, 2006 at 11:29 am
Good point, Cooper. I’ve added that to the post.
October 12th, 2006 at 7:51 pm
If you are curious, I’ve written a Quicksilver action which uses a more flexible syntax for adding iCal events. Its disadvantage is that you can’t specify in QS to which Calendar to add the event, so you need to that in iCal.
The syntax my action uses is
[dateandtime] @@ [event]
or else
[dateandtime] @@ [event] @@ [Note for event]
But here’s the advantage. it’s easy to use because [dateandtime] can take a date formatted in the following styles:
22 February 2004
22 feb 2004
22nd February, 2004
22nd of February, 2004
22 February
February 22 2004
February 22nd, 2004
feb 22
22-2-04
22-2-2004
22/2/04
Friday
next Friday
tomorrow
day after tomorrow
today
and time can be formatted in any of the following styles:
4:00pm
4:00 p.m.
16:00
4pm
4p.m.
4 p.m.
So usually you can actually cut&paste a text phrase naming the date that was written to be human readbale — for instance, a passage in an email.
October 19th, 2006 at 8:46 pm
Your syntax makes the date and time appear in the title of the event (so that there is an event on friday at 10:00 called “friday 10:00 – Meeting”).
The exact syntax according to the documentation has a dubble minus — in the middle: ““date and time — name of eventâ€. If you use the title is just as you entered it – without date and time.
October 19th, 2006 at 8:51 pm
Thanks, Christian. That’s WordPress automatically turning two hyphens into one long dash, and me not picking it up. Thanks.
October 19th, 2006 at 8:53 pm
Ah, OK – I see.
October 19th, 2006 at 8:56 pm
Fixed now.
June 29th, 2007 at 5:09 am
I’ve always loved QS and have been using this tip quite a bit.
One question: There’s no way to add a note or location into an entry right away, right?
I mean [date] [time] — [event] is quite simple
But I still find myself going back to the iCal entry and filling out the location or notes to the entry (directions to the event or a conference bridge # for example).
November 25th, 2007 at 10:21 am
Lemme ask ya something. If I have to open iCal to see whether Quicksilver actually added anything to my iCal or not – doesn’t that mean that Quicksilver iCal i just a waste of time? Anyone?
January 6th, 2009 at 7:18 am
Dave (if you ever check back) and anyone else with this concern:
Growl is your best friend, here. Moments after hitting RETURN a pop-up will appear telling you the new item has been added to your (iCal or Google) calendar or a new task has been added to Remember the Milk or…
It’s wunnuhful.
March 27th, 2009 at 2:23 pm
Very surprised that all-day (or all day or allday) events don’t work using this method.
June 19th, 2009 at 2:26 am
I am using QuickCal Widget now.
http://smellypuppy.com/wp/?page_id=29
July 12th, 2009 at 1:18 am
Am confused. Can’t get it to specify the calendar so it just defaults to whichever calendar was last open – not ideal. Am I missing something? Also, Bush — not related – could you tell me how I get that functionality in Growl? How do I set it up to watch ical?
Thanks,
Jo
July 20th, 2009 at 12:52 pm
My apologies, Jo: the pop-up notification actually is a service of Quicksilver, not growl.
I stopped using iCal because I still have a Tiger machine (and a few linux boxes, now) mixed in among my MacBooks and Apple lovingly made Tiger iCal and Leopard iCal not play nice together; I’m afraid I can’t help you refine that syntax.
August 24th, 2009 at 3:38 am
@Bush:
As Jo said, Growl notifications would be great after having added a new event with the QS.
I just can’t find anything like that – is there any possibility that you remember the name or anything else? ;)
I would love to have this integrated but have googled around without any results.
October 24th, 2009 at 11:26 pm
My understanding of Growl is it automagically works with Apps that use it; perhaps whomever is working to update QS can build that into it, but as I’ve seen no QS updates, I’m not sure we should hold our breath on that.
I know that when I successfully post to my google calendar, I get a QS popup telling me the event was added. It appears in the middle of the screen.
In preferences, I have the following turned ON — mayhap one of these is giving the effect?
* Enable advanced features
* Superfluous visual effects
* !!? Under Handlers is “Notification [QS icon] Quicksilver (Built-in)
When I click the up-down arrow to the right of these, GROWL is an option! I just switched it to that and will see what happens.
IT WORKED IT WORKED! Now I have GROWL QS notifications! WHOOOP!