The neatnik calendar is very nice. Others are talking about enhancements they've done and I've done my own, creating a pretty faithful JavaScript implementation with enhancements:
https://github.com/abetusk/neatocal
https://abetusk.github.io/neatocal/ (demo)
URL parameters can be used to alter behavior. Here's a highlight of some of them:
https://abetusk.github.io/neatocal/?layout=aligned-weekdays&... (weekend highlighted, aligned)
https://abetusk.github.io/neatocal/?start_month=7 (academic)
https://abetusk.github.io/neatocal/?start_month=6&n_month=6 (second half, 6 month)
https://abetusk.github.io/neatocal/?month_code=1%E6%9C%88,2%... (chinese month and day)
There's also a data file option for more complex date notes.
CSS rules for printing is one of my favorite features of the web. You get a powerful typesetter directly in your browser. For those wondering how it's done, I wrote about it [0] recently for my friends who frequently asked how I generated PDFs for my blogs.
[0] https://barish.me/blog/make-your-website-printable-with-css/
Thank you for the nice (and still short) article - I really liked it.
However, while these rules apply for web pages, I would like to... let's say warn all developers expecting CSS is a good option for accurate printing.
It may work for single page printouts or "make this page more printable" approaches, but don't expect it to be an easy opt out of providing PDFs for every single use case.
CSS for printing gets annoying pretty quick as soon as you have some more sophisticated requirements. You should probably also know that print-CSS is not fully cross browser compatible - there are quirks and caveats for every single one of them regarding font sizing, margin, padding and page-layouts.
I would not recommend to use HTML + CSS for something that really needs to be exactly the same layout in every browser.
Thanks for the feedback! Agreed, I too have experienced those quirks. This applies to most modern CSS features in general :-)
FWIW, I also have had also success with running a server-side headless chromium instance on an app where I was generating nicely formatted exam from provided questions.
OTOH, it's good enough that a webapp I vibe-coded in 5 minutes on the phone is better at typesetting and aligning label stickers than Microsoft Word. Or at least easier and gives correct results on the first try, vs. Word that gives me correct results approximately never; I've wasted close to person-day fighting with it over the year already.
Yeah we wanted something that would print with exact physical sizes and there's no reliable support for that so we ended up generating PDF with PDFium in WebAssembly.
Gutenberg[1] Print Styles has been my go-to for a very long time. If I remember correctly, the issues I faced was that I could not control pagination.
Neat! I'll add it to my blog.
Neat, I did one of these too :)
While on the subject, you can make a calendar in as little as 3 lines of CSS: https://calendartricks.com/a-calendar-in-three-lines-of-css/
That was a very nice read, thanks!
> I also removed the background color so we save ink on actual printing.
It seems reasonable to also remove the #post-title border-top:1rem solid var(--accent-dark) for the same reason? That and the padding-top on the same element struck me as unnecessarily moving the printed content down the page.
Daveseah.com was a favorite bookmark for me -- his "printable CEO" series of task planners and calendars were cool.
I have since fallen off the productivity wagon unfortunately.
For many years past I have printed and used stacks of the Emergent Task Planner.
He has a Compact Calendar that has somewhat similar layout as OP.
Edit to add link:
https://davidseah.com/node/compact-calendar/
The website domain seems to have changed a bit.
Big fan for a very long time and still appreciate his work. His domain changed to follow his life choices.[1]
Later in life, I realize that too much reliance on tools is not something I’m fond of. DSri’s tools (printables) are good and I usually do it when I’m helping out team members, and others looking for guardrails for their productivity. For me now, the tools are too tool-focused and I no longer need them. I have printed and used them for product groups, and even a few times for my daughter’s projects with her friends.
These look great for people who like to plan their tasks. I found that when I plan my tasks and plan my day and plan my time bubbles, I spend so much time planning that I don't have time left for doing. This planner explicitly encourages having only three planned tasks for the day. What's wrong with just doing those tasks without writing them down?
I ask in full seriousness, as someone struggling decades with how to plan and then do personal and professional tasks. I ask as a question, not as a criticism.
Writing down is a sign-post for you to stay in your lane.
Otherwise, you were working on a task and something fail in your terminal; by evening you realize you spent the last 4 hours fixing your entire dotfiles, fixing environment, shell, and what-not to move easily between machines smoothly (you also realized you are not moving machines anytime soon).
The Frog to Eat that you wrote down yesterday for today, and the other tasks that has to be done today is there for you to see - bright, and clear - helps you steer back when your minds starts to wander, phone distracts, and HN is tempting for more comments.
As we have come this far, here is another POV for writing things down, when it comes to “NO” or “Not Now!” items that get streamed in our lives.
You are working on something, but a cool/new/interesting thing pops into your brain or someone pings/calls/texts to tell you about something; your default is to do that first lest you forget about it. No, Don’t Do That. Instead, write it down so you don’t forget, but no need to worry for now. Empathetically, if that item was from someone (even in person), seeing you writing it down suggests to the person that you care about it and will definitely come back to it.
At the end of your day, during your break, or after your task-at-hand is complete, visit and “decide” when/how you want to do it, whether you need to do it, or if it has solved on its own in the time you have ignored.
I do use Project Managers, Calendars, Apple Notes/Obsidian, Phone Apps, etc., but if I use that as “defaults” (not on physical pen/paper), I might get tempted to finish something else along with it. That note-taking in the same format as my primary work will likely tempt me to do more and make it look like work or productivity.
With a physical pen/paper, it is a clean, minimal, simple UX that never distracts. That is how it is. I’m still learning and experimenting, but so far I write as usual in a notebook and kinda bullet-journal[1] backwards (mine is simplified), starting from the last page of the same notebook for tasks and to-dos. That one notebook is the one that I carry around.
Neat! I think I've done a similar thing in Jujutsu VCS, which enables you to start a new commit and add a message (description) to it well before you make any actual changes. As you described, it's a really useful way of keeping on track.
I feel like the entire productivity thing is broscience. There's no study for it (the 'three items' idea), it just feels like the right thing to do.
Quite often the people making these tools are not particularly productive themselves. And nobody I know has ever stuck to one productivity system for very long outside of "todo list text file"
The idea is not about One Perfect/Right solution/tool. Explore them and modify them to how you react and which ones work for you. Use multiple tools (plain-text as default, another App with the team, Notebooks for yourself), etc. For someone struggling with too many options, perhaps a little nudge to some direction is what they needed. At the end of the day, It Depends. https://brajeshwar.com/2024/it-depends/
I find if I don’t plan I get a lot less done
Planning shouldn’t take that long
Do it while you’re doing something else. You can plan when you have your morning coffee, or while you commute or walk isn’t Apple voice memos and then copy the transcript and paste it into ChatGPT and have it make you a todo list from that messy memo
It shouldn’t take you any additional time if you don’t want it to.
> I have since fallen off the productivity wagon unfortunately
If you don't mind sharing, what was the reason? I'm asking coz these things and also note taking isn't sustainable for me at all.
Not OP but I used to be totally into productivity hacks and being on top of things, goal setting, habit tracking, everything.
I stopped when I realized I could just... Not, and still thrive in my life. Simplify my systems.
I set myself a goal to workout every morning. Sometimes I miss it because my infant daughter decides to wake up at 4am instead of 5am. I give myself grace.
We eat largely the same meals every day. Some cooked protein, some cooked veggies, and a grain (rice or pasta).
And I just have a regular routine at work where I work on work and also do explorative education for myself during breaks. Look into different frameworks, patterns, etc.
I didn't need to meticulously plan out every second of my day, month, year. I just needed systems that made things predictable. Sometimes I drop the ball and it's fine. I get back on the horse when I can.
I prefer this one: https://veckonr.se/kalender/2026
The year is split in two (ample space for notes) and it has week numbers. At work I print the year on two A3.
The info box doesn't mention this but it also has an alternative layout where days are aligned by weekdays: https://neatnik.net/calendar/?layout=aligned-weekdays
The same, but for the year 2026: https://neatnik.net/calendar/?year=2026&layout=aligned-weekd...
Much better, and solves the Th/Tu problem.
That's good, you should also give me a way to hide the modal to actually see the calendar before I go for printing. Nice work.
I just looked at the print preview in Firefox. Worked fine for me.
I removed it with devtools, so surely there is a dozen of work-arounds, but, still, it just weird that a page that is supposed to show a calendar, doesn't show a calendar.
The website isn't the calendar... The print is, so if you Ctrl p, you can see what you'll get, that's not a workaround it's the purpose of the website, I guess I'm confused how you're confused lol
What if... we removed the month-ends?
I typically imagine time as a line, so I wondered what it would look like if days were rects in one line, just word-wrapped. It doesn't auto-adjust to page size, but 75% zoom works fine for printing in my case.
A variation of that one with month names: https://bigasterisk.com/post/2026%20Calendar%20-%20Print%20-...
Note that you can align the weeks (or not) by adjusting the width at print time.
Oooooh I like this a lot! I had Claude Code make me something in python quickly after I looked at the original post because I also prefer viewing time horizontally. I had mine do each month on a line. Sorry, didn't bother to host as a page. Here's the HTML/CSS though https://gist.github.com/bronco21016/d2d188c402b8e70c7bc115f4...
I like your layout a lot though so I might adapt that and there is still probably room to add the month label at the beginning of each month.
This is a really clever tool. I love the clean, one-page layout for tracking habits over a full year.
One suggestion: would it be possible to add a quarterly version? Like three months per page, or separate pages for each quarter? It'd be great for shorter-term goals without everything feeling so crammed on one sheet.
Thanks for making and sharing this!
There's an example with 6 month pages: https://github.com/abetusk/neatocal?tab=readme-ov-file#prese...
done thanks
Copy and paste the html into an ai tool and ask for your suggestions
Should be able to one shot that in Gemini, ChatGPT or Claude
Done
In Sweden this format is called Hallon-almanackan (the raspberry almanack). I build an implementation here: thttps://hallonalmanackan.kodare.com/
Tack. :) I might use Stylus to change the layout a bit. But actually just what I was looking for!
Here's a rough draft of my interpretation:
https://abetusk.github.io/neatocal/?layout=hallon-almanackan
I've used recalendar.js the past few years for my eInk devices:
This is awesome, but my one suggestion is to abbreviate Thursday as "R" instead of "T" to avoid confusion with Tuesday.
This is how almost all calendars do it when there is only one letter for the day, so it's pretty standard.
I did something, much simpler, some time back in Google Sheets. Around year-end, I go and edit the location of the starting dates each month (drag around, some formatting). I also like the weekdays lined up instead. Use it more as a bigger-picture timeline/schedule for the year, for the family, and me.
Here is the template from last year that I shared with friends. If you are looking at it, take this as a base or an idea and build on it — finances, big life events, travel, etc.
The “Year” tab is kinda like a big-picture plan of where family members are in their years, education, and, hence, significant life events. As the months go by in the year, just fold/hide that portion.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1YwAf8vgVR0FbTU6n1dVO...
PS. I’m tinkering with moving to a plainer text format this year, in MarkDown planning for a 10-year, 20-year, 30-years, and then kinda brain-simulation of what might be in 50 or even 100 years after I’m gone. I plan for the family/generation as an entity and I just insert myself as one of the role in it. ;-)
This is a very smart idea. Life orienteering, we are all running in life and some predefined checkpoints would be nice.
For those living in other parts of the world here ya go:
Append `&sofshavua=1` to the URL.
Interesting. Sofshavua means weekend in Hebrew.
Margins need to be a bit larger.
When printed, "2026" at the top is cut in half and at the bottom "31st" cells are cut right through the slab of 1. On the left side all but last few pixels of dates are cut off, and the last column is visibly narrower than the rest.
This is in Firefox on Windows.
Probably depends on your printer. And you should be able to adjust margins in the print setup.
yeah Firefox on Linux gave me bad margins too, whereas Chrome on Linux printed perfectly :'(
Firefox on MacOS the same, Chrome worked as expected.
This is BRILLIANT!! Thank You. Such as simple idea I wonder I have never thought of doing it myself. I currently have Stick notes to do list but it is a little messy with some date on it.
The older I am, the more I use good old fashion analogue tools like pencil and paper.
Weekly version in sheets makes more sense for me, since almost everything in my year is split logically by week — https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18YsOpI4GsxKGZmpMRQcN...
Generated using this JS in an action script — https://gist.github.com/anfedorov/9f7dc03432a4da783577aec68f...
I cant close the modal?
Just ctrl-p & look at the preview.
Saw this last year and liked it so much I added something very similar to it to Infumap (https://github.com/infumap/infumap). You can drag items of arbitrary type onto dates. When more than one item is associated with a date, a numbered button appears; clicking it lets you cycle through them. Items can be pages or links to pages, which when clicked show the page as a popup. Calendar pages in the parent page display as a list of all items scheduled for the next seven days.
Neat, but it takes two pages on printing in the landscape orientation in Firefox on either A4 or US letter paper sizes here, with minimal font size set to 16. Generally matching of text dimensions to container dimensions is unreliable if you take into account browser settings (not just minimal font size, but also things like differing fonts and disabled custom fonts), and perhaps an SVG image with pre-rendered texts would be more appropriate for such a task. Or even a more pages-oriented format, and for different paper sizes.
Your app inspired me to make a collaborative version
I have a 3’x4’ dry erase version of this calendar format on my office wall. Bought it cheap on Amazon a few years ago. Put work travel dates, anniversaries, birthdays, vacations, etc on it. It’s nice to be able to see the “big picture” at a glance, and my kids love putting their own dates on it such as when they think Halloween decorations should be put up lol.
I've used a Google Sheet exactly like this. Highlighted weekends and laid out with all days of the year. Export as PDF can fit on a single sheet of paper. But I also print it out on a huge paper and hang it up for my family. [https://bettersheets.co/bigyear]
Man, a marketing landing page for a calendar. That's really something.
I doubt HN is your market. Everything about that page made me want to run in fear. And I don't trust your download link.
I expected some dude's blog with an .xlsx upload or something. I would have a lot more trust there.
What am I giving up by using yours? What's in it for you?
This is really nice. I keep track of most important habits to me like how often I go to gym, how much protein I eat everyday, and how many days I read (books), on something physical (pen and paper). Mostly on monthly calendars. This would make tracking each of them separately on a single piece of paper across the entire year pretty neat.
Here's a [Danish spoken] page to make a PDF calendar for any year in Danish, English, Norwegian, or Swedish: https://kalendersiden.dk/
I use that all the time, and it's the only one in this thread I've seen that displays week numbers, which is essential if you are employed.
Nice. It would be nice to have an option to create a per month print as well.
I love the simple layout and idea of this calendar. Very nice! I do however miss some localizations. Is this calendar made for any specific country in mind? Is it possible to change? :)
I can't seem to dismiss the welcome message on mobile.
I used to make these for myself and found them very helpful for planning out the year. Mine had only one difference, which was aligning the days of the week between each month.
As an enhancement, it would be cool to be able to spread into multiple pages. 1 month per page, or 2 months per page, ..., 12 months per page.
It's hard to write on such small boxes.
This looks neat, not exactly sure how useful such a tiny space for each day would be by itself.
I took the complete opposite approach with Wiseday, giving each day its own page (and each waking hour some space too.)
Example: https://imgur.com/a/LjSDPw9
V1 releasing on iOS as soon as Apple finishes reviewing if anyone wants to try (waitlist at https://wisedayplanner.com/waitlist/)
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Clean, readable, and refreshingly boring in the best possible way. Sometimes a calendar should just… be a calendar. Bookmarking this for 2026.
What does the dark background mean? I could only see it inside my print preview (see Fiveplus comment). Otherwise I like.
Saturday and Sunday. Looking at the source, it also accepts `sofshavua=1` options to highlight Fridays and Saturdays instead.
Oh duh, parsed it wrong - too used to 30day calendar views.
Anyone able to print this via Android? When I tap 3-dots in chrome → share→print I am getting an error
Probably because Chrome is shit, it prints fine on Android with Firefox 146.
Unfortunately it doesn't take kindly the futurists who like to spell years with a starting 0, like "02026” - https://neatnik.net/calendar/?year=02026
This proves once and for all that civilization will not last until the decamillenium and you're just doing octal.
This is like a video that I saw where a carpenter uses very high end equipment and skills to create a phone holder to be placed on a desk.
We ran out of real work and real problems.
Tech and machinery is far ahead of the needs of humanity. Yes, you can create and print a single page calendar or carve out a phone holder, but when you think of it's usage, you are not going to need it - YAGNI.
There are proven advantages to hand-writing out notes and planning on paper over digital tools - the physical, tactile experience engages your brain in different ways, and this has been proven by multiple studies.
Digital tools are great. They're why they're here. But a lot of people want paper for good reasons, and it's a very different experience to wanting a wooden holder for your phone.
I agree on the benefits of tactile experience. But it need not come from paper, which is very modern thing. Information is being sucked out from real world, into digital space. College teachers are no longer writing on blackboards. Money is no longer a physical thing. Work is being done in virtual spaces. The only things that are left in physical world are the information-less objects, just like how the world was before invention of writing.
When information finds its natural habitat in the digital space, we need to re-orient ourselves.
Can anyone recommend a native macOS app with a calendar like this that supports .ics calendars?
Very nice, but on an A4 sheet the last row is cut off and you need to manually shrink it
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The popup on the page doesn't close. It's irritating. Please fix it.
Ctrl-p and it's gone.
I like the highlighting of weekends, but wish the weekends aligned across months.
Thanks! I see the feature documented in the README.
Realized, timely, and definite.
Perfect post.
Adding one letter to the day of the week would be way less confusing.
No need to look too closely, now ;)
I think they mean writing Tu Th Sa Su instead of T T S S (personally I'm a fan of T / theta if I'm doing single-letter abbreviations but Sat/Sun is still not the best)
Thorn, Þ, seems a more natural choice. The rune is called thurs, even.
I guess there's katakana Sa サ and Su ス, if that's an improvement.
yeah, but I was a math major and theta looks like a normal letter to me whereas thorn takes me a sec to realize what I'm looking at
I like the katakana idea, I wonder if I can train myself to recognize the Su one enough to start using that when I'm handwriting days of the week places
Maybe we should all adopt Chinese weekday names: Sunday (星期日) remains same, Firstday (星期一) for Monday, Seconday (星期二) for Tuesday, Thirday (星期三) for Wednesday, Fourthday (星期四) for Thursday, Fifthday (星期五) for Friday and Sixthday (星期六) for Saturday. One-letter abbreviations would be simply S, 1 through 6.
Not all of them, though:
Monday - "понедельник", which is coming from the "day after the (previous) week", i.e. after the Sunday Tuesday - "вторник", true here, has "second" in the name Wednesday - "среда", has "middle" in the name Thursday - "четверг", also true, has "fourth" in the name Friday - "пятница", also true, has "fifth" in the name Saturday - "суббота", derived from the Hebrew "shabbat" Sunday - "воскресенье", almost the same word as "воскресение", which is the Christian Church word for the Resurrection (of Jesus Christ)
Why downvoted? This is correct.
Wow, I love this! Great job man
great idea, just printed it out and this will do for my calendar next year!
Now i have printed the year my wife has born, I will mark her birthday only and give it to her as a gift. Thank you!
Is it just me, or can't you close the big pop-in welcome info box on firefox ?
I had the same reaction and I think you are not supposed to close it. Just go Menu -> Print (Ctrl+P) and you will see it without the box.
Looks cool !
Here's another, a bit more uniform and month-agnostic way to format a year -
Wait, so how is it fitting properly? 28*13 = 364, but I don't see a day missing. What am I not understanding?
Jeez, lol. Sorry about that :)
It appears to have 30 days in October and 31 days in November.
Sorry about that. The perils of artisanal calendaring.
I think you're missing August 13th. As the other commenter pointed out, 13*28 = 264.
I think you may have a point.
Not that big of a deal though. I have nothing planned for that day :)
Thanks, you found it! I was going nuts.
What happens on leap years?
You get an extra cell in the last column.
Nice one
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My biggest hope for Elon’s Mars plan is the chance to create a whole new Calendar system that makes sense. Like honestly. 7 days in a week? Random days per month? Uneven quarters? Who the hell decided to put the leap day in February! Clearly it should be at the beginning/end of the year. The western Calendar is nuts.
Why doesn’t every month have 30 days with the last day of the quarter having 31? Ohh leap year? December 32nd or January 0.
Musk may already have thought of this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar
Vive la révolution!
https://c.ndtvimg.com/2020-02/svbftvto_elon-musk-elon-musk-v...
Print? Paper? Jot down with what? My calendar in the cloud performs these functions far better (from my perspective and work habits).
P.S. Maybe I should just remove the part in parentheses, since a number of people are completely ignoring it.
You're likely being downvoted not because there's anything wrong with having an opinion but because this feels like a low effort comment that contributes little to nothing, and comes across as quite negative and dismissive[0]. There's nothing to engage with or spark curiosity and the parentheses don't help with that.
[0]: Surely you know what printing and paper are, and how someone would jot something down, so that part comes across as ridiculing the idea.
Patronizing speculation on the reasons for downvotes (who gaf about such things? And for that matter I had a net gain today despite this) contributes nothing of value and explicitly violates one of HN's guidelines: "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
I attempted to jocularly make a point (e.g., I don't carry a pen or pencil and I almost never print anything, and I'm far from the only person who has made this sort of change in life practice) and the parenthetical was supposed to help to understand what it was and ward off the sort of criticism you're making, but apparently it was futile or even backfired, as it seems that a lot of people missed it and lashed out with hostility ... they should consider https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/6k68hi/the_prin....
> Surely you know what printing and paper are, and how someone would jot something down, so that part comes across as ridiculing the idea.
See, you completely and uncharitably misunderstood what I was attempting to convey. Yes, of course I know what those things are, but I no longer use them. People would jot things down with a pen or pencil, but that requires having a pen or pencil handy ... I almost never do, as a matter of ==> my <== work habits. That's the whole point of the parenthetical--that this is ==> my <== perspective. It doesn't "ridicule" people who do things differently, but it does allude to the fact that the world has changed (radically, speaking as a lifelong early adopter and a pioneer developer [I'm mentioned in RFC #57] for the last 3/4 century ... so much for insults that get thrown my way--including on HN today--as a "boomer" on a regular basis).
I won't comment on this again.
Which calendar is that? I haven’t found one with a decent year view similar to the one here.
Give it a shot.
Awesome! Totally love your version as my first gripe was that I can't adjust naming to fit my needs (localized, non-english). Your JS version is awesome, thanks!
If you want something for your examples, this would be the German-localized version for 2026: https://abetusk.github.io/neatocal/?year=2026&weekday_code=S...
Added to the list of presets in the README [0]. Thanks!
[0] https://github.com/abetusk/neatocal?tab=readme-ov-file#prese...
It would be trivial to allow all possible languages with toLocaleString[0]:
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...Added a language field. Thanks for the suggestion.
Example:
https://abetusk.github.io/neatocal/?language=ko-KR
MDMDFSS
naja
https://abetusk.github.io/neatocal/?year=2026&weekday_code=S...
Awesome. I have added half-colored days and date emojis to my fork. https://github.com/c6p/neatocal
Check out my Turkish Holidays example for 2026: https://c6p.github.io/neatocal/?data=example/tr-2026.json
just posting this because I struggled to figure it out for some reason; for doubled sided printing (duplex) with 6 months on each side:
https://abetusk.github.io/neatocal/?year=2026&start_month=0&...
https://abetusk.github.io/neatocal/?year=2026&start_month=6&...
Thanks for sharing!