Switch To “Two Week” View In iCal [OS X Tips]

By

icaltwoweeks

Here’s a neat trick for iCal which can be useful for those who find the default list of views (day, week, month, and year) a little too limiting.

This tip is excerpted from Mac Kung Fu, a new book containing over 300 tips, tricks, hints and hacks for Mac OS X Lion. 

iCal has four view modes by which you can view forthcoming appointments: Day, Week, Month, and Year. You can switch between them by clicking the tabs in the middle of the iCal program window.

Here’s a quick hack to switch the Week view to showing two weeks (or more), which is useful if your working life is arranged around two-week periods or if you’d just like to see a little further into the future. It makes use of a hidden debug setting.

  1. Quit iCal if it’s open, then open a Terminal window (Finder->Applications->Utilities->Terminal) and type the following:
    defaults write com.apple.iCal IncludeDebugMenu -int 1
  2. Restart iCal and you’ll see you have a new menu: Debug. This is designed to allowing testing of the app by developers, so be very careful not to click any entry on the menu other than the one outlined below!
  3. Click Debug->Top Sekret [sic]->Days in Week View, and make your choice. To view two weeks in Week view, click 14. You can also choose 21 (three weeks) and 28 (four weeks), although be aware that the latter two options will make the iCal program window very wide, and it might no longer fit on your computer screen.
  4. Close iCal, then return to the Terminal window and type the following to remove the Debug menu, which you no longer need:
    defaults delete com.apple.iCal IncludeDebugMenu
    Reopen iCal and you should find that Week view now shows two weeks of appointments, and the Debug menu will have vanished.

If you find that more than two weeks are visible, it’s probably because you’ve switched iCal to show only five days per week (that is, it isn’t showing the weekends). This can be altered under the General tab of iCal’s preferences. You need to switch away from Week view (by clicking the Month view tab, for example), and then switch back to it for the changes to take effect.

To revert to showing only one week in Week view, repeat the steps above to activate the Debug menu, but select Default (7) from the Days in Week View menu option. Then repeat the steps to deactivate the Debug menu. You might also have to switch away from week view and back into it in order to restore the 7-day view.

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