mencal(1)

💖 mencal(1) — the menstruation calendar, bestie edition 💖

okay so. mencal is literally a period tracker that lives in your terminal. it's section 1 of the manual (user commands, iykyk), and it's giving organized chaos in the best way. let's get into it 🩸✨

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

mencal [options] [file1 file2 ... -c CONF1 -c CONF2 ...]

that's it. that's the whole vibe. options in, calendar out. 💅

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

okay so there's three little friend groups of options here: how it looks, how it's configured, and how it tells you stuff. let's go one by one, no skips.

🎀 Display options

these are the ones that control what your calendar actually looks like on screen. main character energy fr.

• -m, --monday — draws monday as the first weekday. (sunday is the default, in case you were wondering 💭)
• -1 — current month only. this is the default, it's the little black dress of flags 👑
• -3 — previous, current and next month. a lil trio. a lil bestie trio 🫶
• -y [YYYY] — the whole entire year calendar. if you don't give it a YYYY, the default is the current year. (the YYYY is optional, like a plus-one you might or might not bring)
• -q, --quiet — no top information will be printed. it's the "no talking, just vibes" flag 🤫
• -n, --nocolor — noncolored output. yes she CAN be monochrome. minimalism is a choice ✨
• -i, --icolor COLOR — intersection color. default is red. the available colors are: red, green, blue, yellow, violet, cyan, shiny, bold. pick your fighter 🌈

ngl "intersection color" is exactly what it sounds like — the color used where the days intersect. use it, love it, respect it.

🧚 mencal configuration

• -c, --config — this is the big one. the format is:

s=[YYYY]MMDD,l=LL,d=DD,n=NAME,f=FILE,c=COLOR

the second argument is a comma separated list of options. and like — no spaces are allowed in this list, fr fr, the parser is not playing around 🚫. if no name is specified, 'Unknown' is used. and you can set various -c options or filenames. stack 'em, bestie.

here's every single one of those little config keys, broken down:

• s, start=[YYYY]MMDD — start day of period. default is the current day ⏰
• l, length=LL — length of period in days. default is 28 📅
• d, duration=D — duration of menstruation in days. default is 4 🩸
• n, name=NAME — name of subject. (that's you, or whoever you're tracking, ilysm)
• f, file=FILE — filename to save configuration to (see the FILES section below 👇). heads up: only menstruation related variables will be saved — it's picky like that 💅
• c, color=COLOR — color used for menstruation days. the available colors are: red, green, blue, yellow, violet, cyan, shiny, bold. default color is red. and btw, with the '-n' switch, color settings are ignored entirely. she said no color and she MEANT it.

💜 Info options

• -h, --help — print help. your bestie when you're lost 🫶
• -V, --version — print version information. the receipts 📜

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🦋 FILES 🦋

• $HOME/.mencalrc — the default configuration file, and it gets automatically loaded. it just shows up. iconic behavior.

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

(C) 2002 C. McCohy e-mail: <mccohy@kyberdigi.cz> Word-Wide-Web: http://www.kyberdigi.cz/projects/mencal/english

and a little lore for you: this manual page was written for the Debian GNU/Linux distribution because the original program does not have a manual page. (but it may be used by others — sharing is caring 💖)

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🌈 HISTORY 🌈

• 22 March 2002 — Originally written by Amaya Rodrigo <amaya@debian.org>.
• 24 Apr 2002 — New manpage contributed by Pablo S. Torralba <psanchez@skyrealms.org>.

Amaya Rodrigo <amaya@debian.org> is now responsible for developing and maintaining this manual page. Comments and suggestions are greatly welcome — she literally said so, so slide into that inbox if you have thoughts 📬

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okay that's the whole thing!! and just so you have the receipts, this page is mencal — Menstruation calendar — mencal(1), from the mencal manual, section 1. go forth and track those cycles, bestie 🌸🩸✨ periodt 💅