Chapter 1. Introduction

KAlarm is a personal alarm message, command and email scheduler. It lets you set up personal alarm messages which pop up on the screen at the chosen time, or you can schedule commands to be executed or emails to be sent.

In its default graphical mode, KAlarm displays the list of pending alarms, showing their times and details. You can create new alarms, or you can select existing alarms for modification or deletion. You can also optionally view expired alarms.

When setting up or modifying an alarm, you may either type in the alarm message text, specify a text or image file to display, specify a command to execute, or enter an email to send. You can also choose the color of the alarm message, whether it should repeat, whether to play a sound, and whether the alarm should be canceled if it cannot be triggered at its scheduled time.

Alarms may also be scheduled from the command line, or via DCOP calls from programs.

When an alarm message is due, it is displayed on each KDE desktop to ensure that you don't miss it. The message window shows the time for which the alarm was scheduled. It usually has a defer option to ask for the alarm to be displayed again later. An example of an alarm message:


Alarm message

When the alarm specifies a command to execute or an email to send, KAlarm displays nothing.

KAlarm can run in either of two modes: “continuous” (the default) where it runs from the KDE system tray, or “on-demand” where it runs as and when required (with the option of displaying an independent system tray icon).

This document makes various references to the alarm daemon. This is an application which runs in the background, checking pending alarms and telling KAlarm to display them when they become due.