Git styled calendar with custom dates
Let us assume that you have a set of dates. You want to display these dates in a readable clear way.
For example like this:
So I have great info. It is required an hour of coding. It is one line of code, maybe two...
In this article I will show how to generate an image like these.
What do you need?
- jq - great toll for json / text processing
- node - js interpreter
- awk - text processor for selecting data
Installation
npm i -g cli-gh-cal
Preparing file with dates
We want to prepare a file with dates like these
2019-08-13
2018-05-19
2018-06-22
2019-04-16
Allow us to assume that you need to show dates of creation of files in your folder with photos. You can do it using the command
ls -l --time-style=long-iso . | awk '{print $6}' | sort > /tmp/dates.csv
Option --time-style allows showing dates in easy to the processing format. Next awk selects column with dates and sorted dates are saved in temporary file /tmp/dates.csv .
Displaying git styled calendar
Now if you want to display these dates you need to type
cli-gh-cal --data "$(jq -R '[inputs | [.,1] ]' < /tmp/dates.csv)"
In this case, we put to work jq - powerfull templater for json files. It allows replacing the list of dates to json string required by cli-gh-cal. After executing this command you should see an image similar to presented at the beginning.
Required packages
To work there have to be installed node. I recommend installing it with nvm on the local machine.
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-node-js-on-ubuntu-18-04
Next package - cli-gh-cal can be installed by npm - node pacakges manager
Finally, you need also jq
I hope you like this article. For me, it is a great example of how a small amount of code is needed to achieve great-looking results in data visualization today. Wow!
Screenshot from my console
