Fantastically Good Parsers for Drafts

One of the small, but powerful for which I use Drafts is sending multiple events to my calendars. And for a long time, I've used the power of Drafts' automation to send those events to my calendar via Fantastical.

That is until Peter Davison-Reiber created something amazing.

The great thing about using Fantastical for this purpose is the natural language parsing capabilities: I can simply type out a calendar event the way I need to type it, and it will populate it for me. But thanks to the incredible scripting capabilities in Drafts 5, it is possible to create the date and time parsing aspects – the part where Fantastical excels – and put that right into an action in Drafts.

The end result is as advertised – fantastically good. Not only does it replicate the way I input events into my calendar, but it does it even faster now that it's all native in Drafts. There is no longer a back-and-forth dance with the action to create multiple events. It runs quickly, and I can move along with what I was working on when it is completed. I can also include locations and durations as well. I can even use the calendar shortcut syntax (example: /w for my work calendar) with the action. It is a really robust solution.^[1]

And if that wasn't enough, Peter requested the changed in Drafts 5.3 which provide the same parsing for reminders as well, which replaces the other aspect of Fantastical for me. You can include the level of priority denoted by exclamation marks ! and use the reminder list denoted by the same shortcut syntax as the calendar (/inbox).

These two actions are what I had envisioned in the GTD module of my review. This is a case where I knew that they were going to be possible, but I do not have the technical knowledge to create. Initially, I wanted to create one based on some unique syntax, similar to the Send to Things action. But what Peter has done here exceeded my expectations and is fantastically awesome.

Cheers Peter!