The App-orgdaemon distribution provides the "org-daemon" program, a Perl/Tk application which sits in the background and "warns" about appointments found in configured Emacs org-mode files. Installation: perl Makefile.PL make make test make install Installation without downloading the distribution: cpan App::orgdaemon or cpanm App::orgdaemon You can use the org-daemon script found in the bin subdirectory also directly, without installation. Make sure that at least Perl/Tk is installed. On a Debian based system this dependency could be installed using sudo apt-get install perl-tk Usage: org-daemon --recheck-interval=3 /path/to/TODO.org & Run "perldoc bin/org-daemon" or "tkpod bin/org-daemon" for complete documentation.