Bug fixes
Add link to invoice project.
Improved documentation, version.
An automated time tracker based on i3 and TimeWarrior.
i3-msg
timew
pkill
To install, download the script and put it in your path.
tracker works by starting a timew task whenever you switch focus to a specific i3 workspace, and stops the tracker when you switch away from that workspace. It provides some fuzz by waiting 30 seconds before starting or stopping a timer, so you can jump away from a workspace (either on purpose or on accident) and back without stopping and starting the timer.
Be on the workspace where you're doing your work and run
tracker start <tag>
where <tag>
is the tag tracker will use for the TimeWarrior tasks. Then go about your business.
Tracker should work with multiple workspaces -- that is, if you start trackers for each of your workspaces, it should do what you'd expect and allow you to track multiple activities. This hasn't been well tested, though, so you may encounter bugs.
If 60 seconds is too granular (or isn't granular enough, you hedgehog you), the variable LAG
at the top of the scrip controls the reaction delay; the units are seconds (300 seconds for 5 minutes, etc).
Run tracker
without arguments to get a more detailed list of run options. The most interesting ones are probably -d
and -n
, which turn on debugging and do-nothing modes, respectively. Use one or the other, not both.
There is a sketchy function called reconcile
that can help clean up the history. If you generate invoices from TimeWarrior, having a bunch of noise in the records can be distracting. reconcile
can help clean this up, and here's how it works:
It tells you exactly what it's doing as it does it, and then prints out the amount of time deleted, the amount of time added, how much that delta is in seconds, and how many operations it performed. That last bit is important, because if it looks like it really screwed up and ate your data, you can use timew undo
to restore it. For example, if reconcile
reports that it did 12 operations, you can run:
for x in `seq 1 12`; do timew undo; done
and get your data back. If you're a sissy, you can also run reconcile with a -n
argument (before the tag) and it'll run in NOP mode -- it'll print what it would do, but won't actually do it.
For my workflow, reconcile
ends up keeping things mostly fair; the end result neither adds nor removes much time to the overall report, and it can greatly reduce the number of records in the report.
Note that this can be used to simulate tracker
being smarter about workspaces, and allow you to have multiple workspaces for the same task. You'd run tracker
on multiple workspaces with the same tag, which would result in multiple back-to-back records as you switch between the workspaces. If you spent all of your time on only those workspaces, switching between them, you might end up with dozens of records for the day; reconcile
would then collapse those into one contiguous record.
If you're a consultant using this, you may also find this invoice generator interesting. It produces nicely formatted PDF invoices from TimeWarrior data.