Swift script to export lists from Reminders.app

I’ve already mentioned how I moved tasks from Todoist to Bear but one of the missing pieces of the migration was some lists that I had on Reminders.

These lists were not really reminders or tasks, it was an easy way I had to keep a list of books or games I want to check on the future.

Reminders has an export option, but it only exports to an .ics file (a calendar file format), so it’s not really useful as it is.

I’ve just written a quick Swift script to gather each item and print it to the console so it can be copy pasted as a simple list. Gist.

As you can see the code is really simple and rudimentary. I haven’t spend much time on it and it just does what I needed. That’s the beauty of scripts and being able to use your beloved language.

You can see how I use swift sh to run the script. I always start with that line because anticipate the need to import some library, but at the end there was no need for it.

There is no nice ICS parsing package in Swift, yet. And maybe this would have been an opportunity for me to create it and contribute back to the community but honestly this script took me 10min to write, I don’t think I could have make a decent parser in the same amount of time 😂

And it’s not something I want to be proud of. If we don’t make these packages ourselves nobody else is gonna make them. So who knows, maybe I put some time to do it, or maybe you can do it and fill a gap in the swift ecosystem 😉