When comparing Calendar vs Calcurse, the Slant community recommends Calendar for most people. In the question“What are the best calendar apps for UNIX-like systems?” Calendar is ranked 1st while Calcurse is ranked 4th.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro GNOME native integration
Pro Currently in active development
GNOME Calendar is improved with every release cycle of GNOME.
Pro Simplicity
Calendar for GNOME aims to find the perfect balance between features and usability.
Pro Synchronisation
It has online accounts integration.
Pro Supports arbitrary backends
E.g. CalDAV. Via its load/save hooks.
Pro Efficient
Uses very few resources, starts in the blink of an eye.
Pro Scriptable
You can use it in scripts via its command-line interface, and run scripts from it via hooks. So you can automate everything away, instead of being forced to use a GUI. A powerful feature.
Pro Fully customizable
Shortcuts, data sources, you name it. As real software should be.
Pro Simplicity
Cons
Con Cannot print
Con Extremely buggy
Con Poor interoperability with online calendars
Does not connect to Fastmail.
Con Far too simple
Con FAR too tied into the GNOME infrastructure
The UI and configuration presume you are running GNOME, and has the ugliness of a GNOME application. Configuration, as is usual for any GNOME application, is pretty much nonesistent.
Con Can't read 'all-day' events with dark theme
Text is white on light blue with dark themes. The workaround: assign all-day events to just one hour.
Con Can't import ics files
Con Continues to pop-up reminders that are turned off and they cannot ever be removed
The GNOME Calendar displays pop-ups from an old Google Calendar that was used. That Google Calendar has long since been removed from GNOME, and even with the notifications turned off on the GNOME Calendar, the pop-ups still happen.
Con Incorrect appointment times when importing .ics calendars
Con No support yet for WebCal
No support yet for WebCal, such as those offered by Facebook events.
A workaround exists. Since this application uses the same background services as Evolution, installing it and adding the WebCal calendars there, also adds them to GNOME Calendar.
Con Only works on GNOME
Con Not made for app users
If you come to any professional or console software, expecting it to just behave like your Windows GUI apps, … you’re gonna have a bad time.
You will need to know what you want, and actually tell the program so, by configuring it. So that then, it will fit you like a glove instead, of you having to fit into a dumbest common denominator mold. Like all professional software.
Con No built-in help
The “help” function only tells you that you can use help on the program’s functions. But not what functions there are! How can you know what to ask for when you don’t know what there is? It’s like a text adventure game or Family Feud all over again.
Con Keybindings also used by certain graphical terminals
The keybindings of either program have to be changed in that (rare) case.
