chronometrist

A time tracker in Emacs with a nice interface

Largely modelled after the Android application, A Time Tracker

• Benefits

  1. Extremely simple and efficient to use
  2. Displays useful information about your time usage
  3. Support for both mouse and keyboard
  4. Human errors in tracking are easily fixed by editing a plain text file
  5. Hooks to let you perform arbitrary actions when starting/stopping tasks

• Limitations

  1. No support (yet) for adding a task without clocking into it.
  2. No support for concurrent tasks.

IMPORTANT: with version v0.3, chronometrist no longer uses timeclock as a dependency and will use its own s-expression-based backend. A command to migrate the timeclock-file, chronometrist-migrate-timelog-file->sexp-file, is provided.

Comparisons

timeclock.el

Compared to timeclock.el, Chronometrist

• stores data in an s-expression format rather than a line-based one
• supports attaching tags and arbitrary key-values to time intervals
• has commands to shows useful summaries
• has more hooks (see Hooks)

Org time tracking

Chronometrist and Org time tracking seem to be equivalent in terms of capabilities, approaching the same ends through different means.

• Chronometrist doesn't have a mode line indicator at the moment. (planned)
• Chronometrist doesn't have Org's sophisticated querying facilities. (an SQLite backend is planned)
• Org does so many things that keybindings seem to necessarily get longer. Chronometrist has far fewer commands than Org, so most of the keybindings are single keys, without modifiers.
• Chronometrist's UI makes keybindings discoverable - they are displayed in the buffers themselves.
• Chronometrist's UI is cleaner, since the storage is separate from the display. It doesn't show tasks as trees like Org, but it uses tags and key-values to achieve that. Additionally, navigating a flat list takes fewer user operations than navigating a tree.
• Chronometrist data is just s-expressions (plists), and may be easier to parse than a complex text format with numerous use-cases.

Installation

MELPA

1. Set up MELPA - https://melpa.org/#/getting-started

   (Chronometrist uses semantic versioning and only releases are pushed to the master branch, so using MELPA Stable is recommended and has no effect on frequency of updates.)

2. M-x package-install RET chronometrist RET

Git

You can get chronometrist from https://github.com/contrapunctus-1/chronometrist

chronometrist requires

• Emacs v26 or higher
• dash.el
• s.el
• ts.el
• anaphora

Add the "elisp/" subdirectory to your load-path, and (require 'chronometrist).

Usage

In the buffers created by the following three commands, you can press l (chronometrist-open-log) to view/edit your chronometrist-file, which by default is ~/.emacs.d/chronometrist.sexp.

All of these commands will kill their buffer when run again with the buffer visible, so the keys you bind them to behave as a toggle.

chronometrist

Run M-x chronometrist to see your projects, the time you spent on them today, which one is active, and the total time clocked today.

Hit RET (chronometrist-toggle-task) on a project to start tracking time for it. If it's already clocked in, it will be clocked out. This command runs some hooks, which are useful for a wide range of functionality (see Adding more information below). In some cases, you may want to skip running the hooks - use M-RET (chronometrist-toggle-task-no-hooks) to do that.

You can also hit <numeric prefix> RET anywhere in the buffer to toggle the corresponding project, e.g. C-1 RET will toggle the project with index 1.

Press r to see a weekly report (see chronometrist-report)

chronometrist keeps itself updated via an idle timer - no need to frequently press g to update.

chronometrist-report

Run M-x chronometrist-report (or chronometrist with a prefix argument of 1, or press r in the chronometrist buffer) to see a weekly report.

Press b to look at past weeks, and f for future weeks.

chronometrist-report keeps itself updated via an idle timer - no pressing g to update.

chronometrist-statistics

Run M-x chronometrist-statistics (or chronometrist with a prefix argument of 2) to view statistics.

Press b to look at past time ranges, and f for future ones.

Attaching tags and key values

Part of the reason Chronometrist stores time intervals as property lists is to allow you to add tags and arbitrary key-values to them.

Tags

To be prompted for tags, add chronometrist-tags-add to any hook except chronometrist-before-in-functions, based on your preference (see Hooks). The prompt suggests past combinations you used for the current task, which you can browse with M-p/M-n. You can leave it blank by pressing RET, or skip the prompt just this once by pressing M-RET (chronometrist-toggle-task-no-hooks).

Key-value pairs

Similarly, to be prompted for key-values, add chronometrist-kv-add to any hook except chronometrist-before-in-functions. To exit the prompt, press the key it indicates for quitting - you can then edit the resulting key-values by hand if required. Press C-c C-c to accept the key-values, or C-c C-k to cancel.

Quick re-use of last-used tags and/or key-values

Add chronometrist-skip-query-prompt to the hook(s) containing chronometrist-tags-add/chronometrist-kv-add, before these functions, and chronometrist-skip-query-reset after them -

(setq chronometrist-before-out-functions '(chronometrist-skip-query-prompt
                                           chronometrist-tags-add
                                           chronometrist-kv-add
                                           chronometrist-skip-query-reset))

Prompt when exiting Emacs

If you wish to be prompted when you exit Emacs while tracking time, you can use this -

(add-hook 'kill-emacs-query-functions 'chronometrist-query-stop)

Time goals/targets

If you wish you could define time goals for some tasks, and have Chronometrist notify you when you're approaching the goal, completing it, or exceeding it, check out the extension chronometrist-goal.el.

Customization

See the Customize groups chronometrist and chronometrist-report for variables intended to be user-customizable.

Hooks

Chronometrist currently has the following hooks -

1. chronometrist-mode-hook
2. chronometrist-before-in-functions
3. chronometrist-after-in-functions
4. chronometrist-before-out-functions
5. chronometrist-after-out-functions
6. chronometrist-list-format-transformers
7. chronometrist-entry-transformers
8. chronometrist-file-change-hook

The hooks whose names end with -functions are abnormal hooks - each function must accept exactly one argument, which is the name of the project which is being started or stopped, as a string.

chronometrist-before-out-functions is different from the other three, in that it runs until failure - the task will be clocked out only if all functions in this hook return t.

Opening certain files when you start a task

An idea from the author's own init -

(defun my-start-project (project)
  (pcase project
    ("Guitar"
     (find-file-other-window "~/repertoire.org"))
    ;; ...
    ))

(add-hook 'chronometrist-before-in-functions 'my-start-project)

Reminding you to commit your changes

Another one, prompting the user if they have uncommitted changes in a git repository (assuming they use Magit) -

(autoload 'magit-anything-modified-p "magit")

(defun my-commit-prompt ()
  "Prompt user if `default-directory' is a dirty Git repository.
Return t if the user answers yes, if the repository is clean, or
if there is no Git repository.

Return nil (and run `magit-status') if the user answers no."
  (cond ((not (magit-anything-modified-p)) t)
        ((yes-or-no-p
          (format "You have uncommitted changes in %S. Really clock out? "
                  default-directory)) t)
        (t (magit-status) nil)))

(add-hook 'chronometrist-before-out-functions 'my-commit-prompt)

Displaying the current time interval in the activity indicator

(defun my-activity-indicator ()
  (thread-last (plist-put (chronometrist-last)
                          :stop (chronometrist-format-time-iso8601))
    list
    chronometrist-events->ts-pairs
    chronometrist-ts-pairs->durations
    (-reduce #'+)
    truncate
    chronometrist-format-time))

(setq chronometrist-activity-indicator 'my-activity-indicator)

Roadmap/Ideas

• Show details for time spent on a project when clicking on a non-zero "time spent" field (in both Chronometrist and Chronometrist-Report buffers).

chronometrist

1. Use make-thread in v26 or the emacs-async library for chronometrist-entries/chronometrist-report-entries
2. Some way to update buffers every second without making Emacs unusable. (impossible?)
3. "Day summary" - for users who use the "reason" feature to note the specifics of their actual work. Combine the reasons together to create a descriptive overview of the work done in the day.

chronometrist-statistics

1. Show range counter and max ranges; don't scroll past first/last time ranges
2. activity-specific - average time spent in $TIMEPERIOD, average days worked on in $TIMEPERIOD, current/longest/last streak, % of $TIMEPERIOD, % of active (tracked) time in $TIMEPERIOD, ...
3. general - most productive $TIMEPERIOD, GitHub-style work heatmap calendar, ...
4. press 1 for weekly stats, 2 for monthly, 3 for yearly

Miscellaneous

1. README - add images
2. [-] Create test timelog file and UI behaviour tests
3. Use for chronometrist-report-weekday-number-alist whatever variables like initial-frame-alist use to get that fancy Custom UI for alists.
4. Multi-timelog-file support?
5. inflatable raptor

Contributions and contact

Feedback and MRs are very welcome. 🙂

• TODO.org has a long list of tasks
• doc/manual.org contains an overview of the codebase, explains various mechanisms and decisions, and has a reference of definitions.

If you have tried using Chronometrist, I'd love to hear your experiences! Get in touch with the author and other Emacs users in the Emacs channel on the Jabber network - xmpp:emacs@salas.suchat.org?join (web chat)

(For help in getting started with Jabber, click here)

License

I dream of a world where all software is liberated - transparent, trustable, and accessible for anyone to use or improve. But I don't want to make demands or threats (e.g. via legal conditions) to get there.

I'd rather make a request - please do everything you can to help that dream come true. Please Unlicense as much software as you can.

Chronometrist is released under your choice of Unlicense or the WTFPL.

(See files UNLICENSE and WTFPL).

Thanks

wasamasa, bpalmer, aidalgol, pjb and the rest of #emacs for their tireless help and support

jwiegley for timeclock.el, which we used as a backend in earlier versions

blandest for helping me with the name

fiete and wu-lee for testing and bug reports