Orage

Orage is a time-managing application that is part of the Xfce 4 Desktop Environment and features a calendar window, lists of events and reminders. It also provides an easy way to archive and manage your old appointments.

Orage is started by typing orage on the command line or in the run application window. You can also start it by clicking on the item orage in the submenu "Office" from the desktop menu. Another handy way of starting orage is to click button 1 on orageclock panel plugin.

But actually the first thing you should do is to adjust your preferences. At least before adding any appointments, you should set your local timezone.

Figure 1. Orage menu item in the desktop menu

When you run orage, you will first see the calendar window appearing.

Figure 2. Default Calendar window

The calendar window provides you a menu bar giving access to different functions. Below that is a nice calendar showing the month, the year, day names, week numbers.

The menu bar

The menubar contains four menus, which are the File, Edit, View, Help.

The File menu

Figure 3. File menu in the calendar window

The file menu contains five items:

• New: fire an appointment window (see below) for creating a new appointment;
• Open archive file...: fire a file selector for opening file containing old items;

  Warning

  This makes the selected file to act as your current active calendar file. It is possible to add, modify and remove appointments from it. You probably only want to take a look and return to your normal file (by closing archive file).

• Close archive file: close the previously opened file - greyed when no file opened;
• Close: close the calendar window, keeping the application running;
• Quit: close the opened windows and end the application;

The Edit menu

Figure 4. Edit menu in the calendar window

The Edit menu gives you access to the setting window, which will be presented later on.

The View menu

Figure 5. View menu in the calendar window

The View menu has two choices:

• View selected date: show the event list of currently selected date;
• Select today: set calendar's selected day to be today;

The Help menu

Figure 6. Help menu in the calendar window

The Help menu has also two choices:

• Help: show this help file;
• About: show information about the authors and license;

Figure 7. Orage eventlist window

The eventlist (or appointment list as it is also called) window shows all activites that you have reserved for the day (date is shown in the window heading the format yyyy-mm-dd). On top of the window it gives you buttons to do actions. (All actions are also available in menus above the buttons.) This is your main activity window and you may want to keep it up all the day and even make it to appear on all workspaces or to be always on top of other windows.