Apple Reminders Commander

The problem

Managing Apple Reminders manually through the UI is slow and interrupts your development flow. You cannot easily script task creation from terminal logs, sync project tickets to your native macOS lists, or generate text-based reports of your upcoming week.

What it does

• Creates reminders with specific due dates, priorities, and recurrence rules directly from the CLI.
• Manages complex task structures including subtasks and parent-child nesting.
• Configures location-based triggers with custom radius settings for errands and mobile alerts.
• Generates machine-readable JSON exports of tasks for custom reporting and dashboarding.
• Performs bulk operations like completing or deleting all items in a specific list.

Frameworks & tools

This skill requires remindctl installed via Homebrew and runs exclusively on macOS. It integrates with the native Apple Reminders database.

Why this beats prompting it yourself

Standard LLM prompts often hallucinate CLI flags or fail to account for the specific syntax requirements of the remindctl binary. This skill follows a strict procedure for handling date formats, location permissions, and subtask nesting to ensure your commands actually execute without database locks or permission errors.

Use cases

• Syncing GitHub issues or Jira tickets into a "Work" reminder list.
• Generating a daily "Today" digest piped into your terminal or a log file.
• Setting up complex recurring maintenance tasks without clicking through menus.
• Cleaning up completed tasks across multiple lists using bulk commands.

Known limitations

Only works on macOS. Requires manual privacy permission Granting in System Settings. The Reminders app should be closed during execution to avoid database access conflicts.