Screenshot of Three Month Calendar opened beneath its Mac menu bar item

3MC is a fast, clean, configurable Mac calendar viewer. It pulls down from your menu bar with a click or keystroke, presenting a continuous, freely-scrollable view of three months’ worth of weeks, with configurable markers for your calendar events, switchable calendar views, and plenty of options.

Three month calendars, a classic style for paper desk planners, are much more useful than one-month-at-a-time views. Want to see how far out some event is? Wondering what day of the week it’s on? Need to plan time off sometime in the next six weeks? Do it at a glance.

3MC version 3 requires macOS Ventura. It’s a one-time, up-front purchase, at $7.99 in the US or similar price elsewhere.

3MC is by me, Aaron Trickey. For any questions, problems, support, or other feedback on the app, please drop me an email at 3mc@casualprogrammer.com, or find me at @at@universeodon.com on Mastodon.

Help & Usage

Screenshot of Three Month Calendar opened beneath its Mac menu bar item
Three Month Calendar, showing one of its themes and a few of its event marker styles

Click on the menu bar icon to open or close 3MC. While open, it stays on top of all other windows and won’t take keyboard focus, so you can leave it up while working on other things.

It always opens with today’s date visible. It selects the three months to show based on your settings; you can choose to put today’s month at the top, middle, or bottom of the view, or to always present the current quarter.

With the calendar open, you can freely scroll up or down with your scroll wheel or other scrolling gestures. Alternatively, use the up/down arrow buttons to jump up or down by one month, or press the “target” or “dot” button to reset to the initial scroll position.

There’s a menu, available from the rightmost button in the (default) toolbar, or by right-clicking on the menu bar icon. From that menu, you can pull up Settings, and start to tune things up.

First-time setup

When you first launch 3MC, an intro window will appear. You probably want to check the “Start 3MC automatically” box. You can always change this later.

Screenshot of 3MC's initial welcome window
First-time welcome window

Configuring the calendar window

The first settings panel is for general calendar-window options.

Screenshot of 3MC's Calendar Window preferences
Calendar window settings

The first few options control how the window looks.

The next few options control how it behaves.

Configuring startup and the keyboard shortcut

Use the Shortcut panel to give yourself a global hotkey to open/close the calendar for rapid access. This works from anywhere, as long as 3MC is running, and as long as you’re not using another app which takes over that shortcut.

Use Startup to make sure 3MC is always in your menu bar by making it a Mac Login Item. Or not, if you don’t always want it there. You can always run it from Applications.

Calendar Views

A calendar view lets you configure the labels and events shown in 3MC, if any. You start with one view, called “Default”; you can stick with that or create additional views for different contexts like work vs. personal or different projects.

3MC Settings window, with the default calendar view selected, and two other views configured
Configuring calendar views

Each calendar view can be independently set up to show weekday names, week numbers, weekends, month labels, and a marker for today's date, and each one has its own set of system calendars you add. (These calendars are from your Mac's Calendar app.)

Once you have more than one calendar view, you can switch between them in a few places, including the app's menu and the Settings dialog.

You can also use an action from within the Shortcuts app, if you want to automate this switching, for example from a macOS Focus Mode.

The 3MC menu with three different views available

Viewing events

When a calendar day has one or more event markers on it, simply hover your mouse over it to see a brief summary. The squares reflect the calendar colors, and the events’ titles and time ranges are shown.

In Settings, you can switch this popup to a “sticky” mode where you have to click on a date to pop up its events, and click on a close button to make it go away.

Details appearing while hovering over a date in 3MC
3MC's details popup; this only appears when a day has visible event markers

Note on languages and regions

3MC was designed to adopt your Mac’s system-wide date format settings. I’ve personally tested it with a fair number of languages and settings, but it’s possible you’ll use a combination which doesn’t look quite right; let me know and I’ll try to fix it. (3MC’s menus and dialogs are all in US English, however.)

Acknowledgments

Release History