How to display calendar in terminal with Monday as the start of the week

cal is a nice utility that displays calendar in terminal, but there is a small problem that needs to be fixed as it uses Sunday as the start of the week.

cal is a link to ncal utility.

$ ls -l $(which cal)
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 Jun 11  2012 /usr/bin/cal -> ncal

It is a part of the bsdmainutils package.

$ dpkg-query -S ncal
bsdmainutils: /usr/share/man/man1/ncal.1.gz
bsdmainutils: /usr/bin/ncal
bash-completion: /usr/share/bash-completion/completions/ncal

It uses Sunday as the start of the week.

$ cal
     April 2018
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
 1  2  3  4  5  6  7
 8  9 10 11 12 13 14
15 16 17 18 19 20 21
22 23 24 25 26 27 28
29 30

cal does not support -M flag to use Monday as the start of the week, but ncal does support it.

$ cal -M
Usage: cal [general options] [-hjy] [[month] year]
       cal [general options] [-hj] [-m month] [year]
       ncal [general options] [-bhJjpwySM] [-s country_code] [[month] year]
       ncal [general options] [-bhJeoSM] [year]
General options: [-NC31] [-A months] [-B months]
For debug the highlighting: [-H yyyy-mm-dd] [-d yyyy-mm]

$ ncal -M
    April 2018
Mo     2  9 16 23 30
Tu     3 10 17 24
We     4 11 18 25
Th     5 12 19 26
Fr     6 13 20 27
Sa     7 14 21 28
Su  1  8 15 22 29

You can use the old-style ncal output to display calendar with Monday as the start of the week.

$ ncal -M -b
     April 2018
Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su
                   1
 2  3  4  5  6  7  8
 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
16 17 18 19 20 21 22
23 24 25 26 27 28 29
30

Create an alias to solve this problem permanently.

$ echo 'alias cal="ncal -M -b"' | tee -a ~/.bashrc
alias cal="ncal -M -b"

$ source ~/.bashrc

$ cal
     April 2018
Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su
                   1
 2  3  4  5  6  7  8
 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
16 17 18 19 20 21 22
23 24 25 26 27 28 29
30

$ cal 08 2019
    August 2019
Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su
          1  2  3  4
 5  6  7  8  9 10 11
12 13 14 15 16 17 18
19 20 21 22 23 24 25
26 27 28 29 30 31