yCal Help

User interface shortcuts

yCal's user interface has been designed to basically "get out of your way": you should be able to reach the functionality you want with as few mouse clicks, key strokes, or interactions as possible.

If you're a well-versed OS X user, most of yCal's features should feel natural and intuitive to you. However, there may still be a few things you haven't thought of yet or haven't tried yet. So here comes a list of nice but maybe less obvious shortcuts:

Navigation

Press 1 to switch to year view, press 2 to switch to week view. If window height permits, you can also view both the year view and the week view at the same time by dragging the divider bar up and down. Use the little handle left to and to drag the divider bar.

In year view, scroll through the years by dragging the empty white border of the year view, using a two-finger swipe gesture, or using and keystrokes. Press T to quickly return to the current year. Use the keyboard's arrow keys to move around (have one day selected and move this selection). Read here about what else you can do in the year view.

In week view, scroll through the weeks by dragging anywhere outside of events, using a two-finger swipe gesture, or using and keystrokes. Press T to quickly return to the week. Read here about what else you can do in the week view.

Quickview

While in year view, you may double-click a day (or have a day selected and then press the spacebar) to open a quickview panel showing the events of this day. Pressing spacebar again (or the ESC key) closes the quickview again. While the quickview is open, you can use the arrow keys on your keyboard to navigate the quickview to another day. From the quickview panel you can also quickly jump to the corresponding week view by clicking the Week button.

Wherever the little candle icons or notes icons (or dog-ears) show up (remember: you can configure year view and week view to show or not show those items), just hover the mouse pointer over those icons for a second, and a quickview panel will show further details. Move the mouse (or press the ESC key) to close those panels again.

Calendar and marker info

Double-click on a calendar in the left pane to get some quick statistics (numer of events in this calendar for each month and cumulated total for the year). The same works on markers — if you set set up a marker for your days of vacation, this is a nice way to get an overview how much days you already spent and how many are still left, for example.

If you Alt-double-click calendars or markers, you quickly get to the editing panel instead.

Event editing

Events can be added, edited, and deleted in the week view. Double-click in an empty spot to create a new event. Keep in mind that this event will be created in the calendar currently selected in the left pane — if no calendar is selected, the first calendar from top will be used. If the calendar is unchecked, no event can be created.

Double-click an event to get a quickview panel showing the event details. From there you can press the Edit button to edit the event. Alternatively, Alt-double-click the event to directly get to the edit panel.

Click to select an event, then press the backspace key to delete it. Drag events by clicking and holding the left mouse button. In case you accidentally started dragging an event, don't let go the mouse button but press the ESC key (while still dragging) — this will cancel the drag operation and return the event to where it was.

Right-click on a day's title to open the day's context menu, allowing you to add a full-day event, notes, or markings.

Finding events

Press F to open the Find panel and just start typing a few letters. You'll see events matching your selection show up as you type.