Free your Datas from The Tyranny of the Organizer

Thunderbird devs made a choice to render immutable and uneditable the contents of an imported calendar event in a manner consistent with their iTIP (iCalendar Transport-Independent Interoperability Protocol) implementation. I’m sure there are good reasons in the grand scheme of things but the practical result is that I can’t prioritize or categorize my own calendar, nor can I add notes (like directions or connection instructions) to the dumb-ass lame invites various tools generate in their pathetic, insufferable implementations of iCal.

This is just insufferable arrogance on the developer’s part: there is ONE CORRECT WAY TO USE YOUR DATA AND YOU ARE A BAD PERSON FOR SUGGESTING OTHERWISE. NO DATA FOR YOU.

There used to be a plugin before the TB team nuked their plugin developers and threw them all under a bus, ReminderFox was awesome, but that whole “screw you” of TB68+ just destroyed the ecosystem and it really isn’t possible to customize Thunderbird to the degree needed to do this sort of thing any more.

If you can’t do it IN thunderbird, do it out (like the way the Sieve Plugin has to work now, not a plugin, but an external application). So I vibe coded a little utility that reads the calendar/cache.sqlite file and does what you need it to do: allows editing of imported event priority, category, and description.  That’s all it is for.  If you need this, you need it.  I do because I use category and priority assignments to generate daily digest emails for myself, a cute home page with my critical upcoming events, and a TB doesn’t need to run notification system.

This is a little TUI-based program (olde skool) that reads the default (linux) locations for TB’s cache.sqlite (where calendar and todo data is stored) and prefs.js (where event categories are stored) and provides a fairly easy to use tool that you can use to find and edit events so you can configure them so they work for your life, not the dictatorship of the event organizer.

https://gitlab.com/gessel/thunderbird-edit-imported-events

Screen shots: