About - Killendar

About

The story behind the calendar, and the field tech who built it.

The maker

"It started off as a joke. I could not think of a killer feature worth releasing it for. Then it occurred to me that being lightweight, and not wanting anything from you, might be the feature."

I'm Steve the Killer, a field technician and systems administrator at a large MSP. I had been building websites since the 90s and spent roughly eight years as a full-stack developer before I moved into IT, so writing the tool I need comes as naturally to me as fixing the machine in front of me.

Killendar sat on my drive for a while as a thing I had made for myself. Every calendar I could have used instead wanted an account, and I did not want to hand a login to something whose only job is to remember that the dentist is on Thursday. So the app that had no killer feature turned out to have one after all: it does not want anything from you.

The app

Killendar is a native Windows calendar that ships as a single self-contained executable. Install it or run it portable. There is no service to register, no account, and no subscription. Hand someone the .exe and they have a calendar.

Your appointments live in one .kcal file in your own profile. It is an ordinary SQLite database, so it is yours to read, back up, move, or open with any SQLite tool. Set a password and the whole file is encrypted at rest with SQLCipher; leave it off and it stays plain SQLite. Either way nothing leaves the machine, because there is nowhere for it to go.

It does month, week, day and agenda views, color categories you define yourself, and iCalendar import and export so whatever you put in can come back out. Six themes, ten languages, and a keyboard shortcut for everything, because a tool you have to go looking for with the mouse costs you the time it was meant to save.

Much of what it does next will be driven by what people ask for. The GitHub issues page is open to anyone, and suggestions genuinely shape where it goes. Killendar is free software under the GPL-3.0 license, and the Technical page has the deep details.