The GNOME Calendar app is to gain support for recurring calendar events in GNOME 3.26.
Developer Yash Singh is working to add the relevant code necessary to support recurring events as part of the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2017.
“Support for recurrent events already exists in Evolution calendar but it is lacking in GNOME Calendar. For example, right now, for a weekly repeating event, users have to manually add that event every week which is very inconvenient and time consuming,” he explains.
Yorba’s (much missed) California calendar app supported recurring events through natural language input, a feature I sincerely miss. Being able to schedule a recurring weekly or monthly event without needing to wade through date pickers and other dialogs would be greatly appreciated.
The GSoC work on GNOME Calendar will also make it possible to edit a recurring event and apply those changes individually, to a specific set, or to all scheduled listings of the same event, both by making manual edits to one listed or by using drag and drop (as the gif at the top of this post demonstrates).
By the time the work is finished GNOME Calendar should be able to:
- Automatically detect when an event is recurring, e.g., ‘monthly catchup’, etc
- Allow you to specify how long an event should recur for, e.g, ‘next 5 weeks’, etc
- Handle complex recurrences with rules and exceptions
- Support editing/rescheduled of recurring events
You can track the work being made to support recurring events in GNOME Calendar on this wiki page.
Otherwise, mark your diary for either September 2017, when a new stable release of GNOME Calendar will appear, or October 2017, when a new stable release of Ubuntu, which ships this calendar app by default, will emerge.