DelayAfterOpenBehaviorInBothApps
So the very first thing I did while testing Cron and Vimcal side by side was kind of dumb: I opened them at the same time, on the same machine, intending to just feel which one worked faster. But I forgot that Electron apps like Cron take a second to warm up — especially when they haven’t been opened recently. Vimcal too, honestly. There’s a slight delay, even when you think you’re ready.
With Cron, I’d double-click the app icon, and it would show the splash screen, load the calendar view, then lag slightly before event data actually showed up. The external invitations (like things synced from Google) would sometimes show up two full beats after the UI loaded. I counted it aloud one time — I opened Cron, saw “Today,” moved my mouse to create a new event, and then boom, the rest of my calendar finally rendered underneath. Not ideal.
On Vimcal, it was more inconsistent. Sometimes it would pop right in — especially if I had used it earlier the same day. Other times it just gave me a blank view for a second, and then a hard flicker when it first painted all the meetings. No loading indicator, nothing subtle. It’s that kind of jumpcut that makes your brain go “did I break something?” 😅
Neither of these apps feels like Google Calendar where everything already exists server-side. Both have some type of local caching and rendering pipeline that makes the startup a little bumpy.
SpeedOfCreatingNewMeetings
Now this is where I started to get obsessed. Because on paper, creating a meeting should be ridiculously fast in both — you hit a shortcut, fill in a few fields, hit enter, done. But it really depends how many people you’re inviting and how many fields you care about.
Cron has this Command-K style approach. Hit Cmd+N, bam, popup from the bottom center. Sounds great. But imagine this: you’re trying to change the title, invite three coworkers, toggle the meeting to Zoom, and switch the calendar from your personal to your work one. That’s five small decisions, and Cron’s popup tries to do it all inline, horizontally.
What this means practically is:
– Your cursor jumps between fields using Tab, fine.
– But adding people with autocomplete is sticky. You type the name, hit enter, it fills… but sometimes I accidentally triggered the calendar switcher instead.
– Zoom integration isn’t instant either. There’s a dropdown for video call but the Zoom link sometimes took a two-second beat to generate ☹️
Vimcal handles this with a totally different feel. It opens a full modal in the middle of the screen with a distinct field layout:
– Title
– Attendees (huge autocomplete bar)
– Date selector with clickable mini calendar
– Time selectors with inline timezone converters (!!)
– Toggles for Zoom (which work faster in Vimcal — no idea why)
And the killer: keyboard controls feel *way faster* in Vimcal as long as you memorize them. Like typing “1pm tomorrow with Rachael” in the Quick Create bar will instantly parse that. Cron tries, but Vimcal’s parser wins.
If you mostly create two-person meetings and use default durations, Cron is fine. But anything with more complexity gets frustratingly slow unless you memorize the interface wrinkles.
SpeedOfFindingAvailableTimeSlots
This one made me want to scream, because technically both apps claim to support “availability views” — the kind you need when you’re scheduling with a group. In theory, this should help you find overlapping windows, suggest times, and avoid that awkward back-and-forth.
But again, here’s what actually happens:
In Cron:
– If the guests are on Google Calendar and you have visibility, you can see their slots in a faint overlapping grid.
– But you have to manually drag through the weekly view to get a feel.
– There’s no alternative view that lines up multiple people side-by-side.
In Vimcal:
– There’s a literal command called “Magic Time Finder”… which sounds ridiculous. But it’s actually super useful.
– You open an event, start typing invitees, and then click “Find Time.”
– It does a compare of the calendars (if shared) and renders suggested slots with color-coded tiles.
– BUT: If even one person doesn’t have shared access, the whole thing falls back to “just pick a time.”
So neither app nails this perfectly. But Vimcal comes closer, especially in smaller teams where you all use the same calendar backend and have shared visibility set up.
Also, minor Vimcal annoyance — for people in different timezones, it will try to adjust, but sometimes auto-snaps to your local instead of theirs unless you explicitly toggle it. I messed that up twice last week. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
HowFastCalendarSearchActuallyFeels
This drove me up the wall for a day, because calendar search is one of those features you take for granted — until you can’t find “Design review Q2 prep” from last month 😬
Cron’s search bar is global, and it does a pretty fast full-text sweep of your events. But it only searches titles by default — not description notes, not attached people (as of the last time I checked). That means if I search for “Asana meeting,” it’ll only find events with that literal phrase in the title.
Also: when the results come back, you get a weird scrollable list inside a modal, instead of being jumped to the actual date in the calendar. So you can’t just preview the week when that event is — you’d have to click into it and then back out.
Vimcal: now this is weird. It searches across fields including descriptions and guests *if you use the advanced search* bar. But that bar does not appear unless you hit a separate keyboard shortcut. Regular Cmd+F gets you a simpler search that’s… not great.
But the moment you use their detailed search — especially if you remember tags or keywords you left in a description field — it’s shockingly robust. Example: I typed “Usability + Stripe” and bam, it pulled up a meeting from three weeks ago with both words buried in the notes.
Still, neither of these behaves like Gmail’s search. You’re not getting synonyms, calendar context, or formatting. Just raw string hunt logic. But Vimcal feels more powerful once you learn the quirks.
BehaviorWhenManagingRecurringEvents
Okay so this surprised me. You’d think recurring events would be a solved problem in 2024. But here’s where both apps get a little… fragile.
First — in Cron, creating recurring events is easy. Daily, weekly, custom repeat patterns. But editing them is where things break. If you cancel one instance of a recurring event and then try to move it, Cron sometimes treats it as an entirely new series. There was a day I tried canceling a Monday standup and rescheduling it to Tuesday… and it wiped the whole series instead 🤦
It’s like the app snapped: “something changed? Ok you clearly hate this series, let’s clean up.”
Vimcal is more cautious. Cancelling one meeting gives you a modal:
– Cancel just this event
– Update entire series
– Break this one from the series
Third option is key. It lets you reassign, retitle, or switch calendars without disturbing the rest. But visually you still see the broken one with a slightly different color. Feels very human. Also a lifesaver if you’re managing internal 1x1s that frequently shift.
Where Vimcal struggles is making custom repeat patterns. It supports basics: “every week,” “every other week,” etc. But try making “third Thursday of every other month”? Nope. You’d have to manually duplicate and drag.
Not a disaster — just slower than I hoped. But for day-to-day expectations like weekly meetings or daily blocks, both apps are usable if you pay attention.
SpeedOfSwitchingBetweenCalendars
This shouldn’t be complicated, but somehow it still is.
Let’s say you’ve got a work calendar, a personal one, and you sync Slack to both. Now you’re jumping between views depending on whether you’re scheduling a sales call or planning your dog’s grooming 🐶
Cron uses left-hand toggles. You can individually turn calendars on or off. Feels like flipping switches. But it doesn’t save your presets. If I want to just view Work + Freelance for 10 minutes then return to All, I have to manually undo the toggle mess.
Vimcal handles this better (IMO) with named calendar sets. You can create a view called “Work Only” and one for “Travel Planning,” and then switch between them with a click. WAY faster. If you’re managing calendars across orgs (yes I had five going at one point), this actually becomes the main speed difference.
Cron also has this thing where the colors for synced calendars occasionally reset after updates, so your Personal calendar goes from pink to blue, and now everything looks different 🙃 Took me two weeks to realize that’s why my meetings suddenly looked wrong.
Also — bonus point for Vimcal: the calendar switch syncs immediately across multiple browser sessions. So if you switch views on your desktop, your laptop reflects it. Cron doesn’t share that state.
ResponseTimeWhenInvitationsAreChanged
I tested this pretty unintentionally. A teammate cancelled a meeting I was about to join, and I wanted to see how fast that news hit both calendars.
In Cron: invitation updates were visible after about 10 seconds, even though Gmail got them instantly. If you’re sitting on the calendar screen, the status will flicker when an event is removed, but occasionally you have to force a full refresh.
Also — if someone changes the *description* of an event (like adding a Zoom agenda), Cron does not push-refresh it until you reload the app. Been burned by this before: I showed up to a meeting with the wrong link because my app wasn’t auto-pulling.
Vimcal did better here. It subscribes hard to live changes, possibly via some kind of websocket. When an invite I had open was updated, the notes field flickered and changed by itself. Creepy? A little. But useful.
However: dismissing canceled events is clunky in Vimcal. Sometimes the “this was canceled” banner stays stuck until tomorrow. I straight up had a canceled happy hour block living on my Friday until Saturday morning 😕
InterruptionsFromNotificationWindows
Ugh, this is where I started closing the apps out of frustration.
Cron notifications show as regular macOS banners — cool. But clicking on one doesn’t always open that exact meeting. It just opens Cron… and then nothing. That confuses me *every time.* Shouldn’t it open the event?
Even more weird: sometimes clicking a notification just doesn’t do anything. Like it fires and disappears, and then I’m like… was that important? Did I already dismiss it? 🥴
Vimcal makes a separate mini window when a meeting is about to start. It includes title, time, and the direct link in a standalone floating panel. Super helpful if I’m in messy tabs. But: that window sometimes doesn’t close itself if the meeting ends early. I’ve had a Zoom window AND the Vimcal bar open 20 minutes after a call ended, which looks very messy in recordings.
Also — if you open a second meeting accidentally, Vimcal opens a second floating preview. So you can have like, four little render panels hiding under windows. Hilarious but chaotic.
Anyway, that’s where I landed. Neither app is perfect. But if you care about fast meeting creation, better guest handling, and keyboard controls, Vimcal definitely edges out Cron — though I’ll probably keep both installed just to yell at each one when they break again 🙂