© 2009 Joachim Breitner mail@joachim-breitner.de
The Automatic Rule-Based Time Tracker is a desktop daemon that runs in the background and, every minute, records what windows are open on your desktop, what their titles are, which one is active. The accompanied statistics program lets you derive information from this log file, i.e. what how much of your time have you been spending with e-Mail, or what projects are your largest time wasters. The mapping from the raw window titles to sensible „tags“ is done by a configuration file with an powerful syntax.
You can build and install this program as any other Cabalized program:
$ runhaskell Setup.hs configure
$ runhaskell Setup.hs build
$ runhaskell Setup.hs install
You also need to make sure that arbtt-capture is started with your X
session. If you use GNOME or KDE, you can copy the file
arbtt-capture.desktop
to ~/.config/autostart/
. You might need to put the
full path to arbtt-capture in the Exec
line there, if you did not do a
system wide installation.
If you want to record samples at a different rate than one per minute, you
will have to pass the --sample-rate
parameter to arbtt-capture.
Full documentation is now provided in the user manual in the doc/ directory. If you have the docbook xsl toolchain installed, you can generate the HTML documentation by entering "make" in that directory. Otherwise, you can use the online version of the User’s Guide Beware that this will also reflect the latest development version.
You are very welcome to help the developement of arbtt. You can find the latest source at the darcs repository at http://darcs.nomeata.de/arbtt
Git mirrors are available at
- http://git.nomeata.de/?p=darcs-mirror-arbtt.git
- https://github.com/nomeata/darcs-mirror-arbtt
- https://bitbucket.org/nomeata/arbtt
User and Developer discussion happens on the arbtt mailing list: arbtt@lists.nomeata.de To subscribe to the list, visit: http://lists.nomeata.de/mailman/listinfo/arbtt
The issue tracker is hosted on bitbucket: https://bitbucket.org/nomeata/arbtt/issues Why Bitbucket and not GitHub? Why not, and we need diversitiy even in the cloud! (Don’t worry, you can use your GitHub account there.)
Some of my plans or ideas include:
- A graphical viewer that allows you to expore the tags in an appealing, interactive way. Possibly based on the Charts haskell library.
- Looking forward and backwards in time when writing rules. (Information is already passed to the categorizing function, but not exposed to the syntax).
$total_idle
time, which is the maximum idle time until it is reset. This would allow the user to catch the idle times more exactly.- Rules based on time of day, to create tags for worktime, weekend, late at night. (Partially done)
- Storing the current timezone in the tags, for the prevoius entry to be more to be more useful.
- Storing the hostname, in case a user has several.
- Statistics based on time, to visualize trends.
- Possibly more data sources?
Any help cleaning, documenting or testing the current code is appreciated as well.
The file setup.iss
contains an installer script for Inno Setup and can be used
to create the windows installer for arbtt. It can be used under wine. To build
arbtt under Windows, you need to install the Haskell Platform. Because the
Haskell Platform ships an older version of the w32api package from mingw, you
also need to download w32api-3.14-mingw32-dev.tar.gz
and copy at least the files
include/psapi.h
and lib/libpsapi.a
over the files installed by the Haskell
Platform. For the pcre-light
package, you need to install the pcre
library.
Unless you run a German version of Windows, you’ll need to adjust the path to
the pcre3.dll
file in setup.iss
. Install Inno Setup
. Create the documentation
(make -C doc
) and configure arbtt with the --with-ISCC-flag
:
$ wine runhaskell Setup.hs configure --with-ISCC='C:\Programme\Inno Setup 5\ISCC.exe'
again adjusting the path if you do not have a German version of Windows. This
will put the version name into setup.iss
and create the output file as
dist/arbtt-setup-<version>.exe.
Download links: