Show HN: Thyme, a simple CLI to measure human time and focus | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Thyme, a simple CLI to measure human time and focus

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99 pointsgonedo18 comments

It is unbelievable how far procrastination can go: you wrote an entire productivity profiling tool!

Creator of Thyme here. I made it track my own application usage and find possible interventions to boost my productivity. Happy to answer any questions and hope you find it useful!

So from my understanding, given how you've commented that it works with Xorg, you're getting the list of everything on the screen that is currently drawing a rectangle. Do you get some false positive issues with things like your window manager. What about if I made the mistake of listening to the wrong kind of music while programming (or playing YouTube in the background) -- thyme wouldn't be able to track those, right?

Also, is the name a reference to this xkcd? It's the first thing I thought of when seeing the name. https://xkcd.com/282/

Looks like a nice project but me myself prefers Wakatime that breaks down the time between project (basically git sources you open in your editor) rather than all the application opens. Then I can see what project I'm spending too much/little time at and balance myself.

Dashboard looks something like this: http://imgur.com/a/jdRct

Looks excellent. My immediate thought was whether it could be developed to get one step ahead: actually flag up the "bad" behaviour when you're doing it, rather than afterwards when it's too late

Obviously, that could sometimes be deeply annoying but there'd be plenty of times I'd like a calm push to focus and to stop switching about!

Of course detecting that sort of behaviour effectively would be a non-trivial task but it strikes me as pretty helpful.

I'm excited to try this out. It'll be fun to compare to some of the data I get by using RescueTime[1].

[1] - https://www.rescuetime.com/

I'm excited to try this myself because I'm kind of hoping I can ditch RescueTime! Not that I don't like it, but it's $ and they have my data. It feels weird to be running their agent on my systems, and I actually don't run it on my work machines because that's a bridge too far.

I wrote a very bare-bones version of this a few years ago for my personal use on MacOS, which has been running ever since: https://github.com/goerz/activity_logger/

This looks much more polished though, so it may be time for a switch!

Is there a similar tool for windows?

Apologies for the lack of Windows support! I unfortunately don't have a Windows machine, but all that's necessary to add support is to implement this simple Go interface: https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/sourcegraph/thyme/-/blob/.... I'd gladly trade a drink for a pull request (or a free t-shirt if you're not in San Francisco)!

How do you install it on Mac OSX?

You can find instructions in the README here: https://github.com/sourcegraph/thyme. But to summarize:

0. Install Go (https://golang.org/doc/install?download=go1.7.darwin-amd64.p...)

1. `go get -u github.com/sourcegraph/thyme/cmd/thyme`

2. `thyme dep`

3. Follow the instructions printed by `thyme dep`

For those on OSX, using Homebrew to install go is a far nicer experience, in addition to making it easier to keep things up-to-date. http://brew.sh then `brew install go` will move you past step 0, although I somehow thought one had to specify a `GOPATH` in order to use `go get`:

    $ go get -u github.com/sourcegraph/thyme/cmd/thyme
    package github.com/sourcegraph/thyme/cmd/thyme: cannot download, $GOPATH not set. For more details see: go help gopath

meaning there is a step 0.5 of `export GOPATH=/some/place/with/a/lot/of/disk/space` and (again, as I understand it) you'll want `$GOPATH/bin` in your `$PATH` or step 2 will not behave as expected.

For what it's worth, I didn't need step 0.5. brew install go, go get -u ... worked right away. I did not have go on this machine yet.

README updated with this alternative, thanks!

Not working. I will open a ticket.

kindly add remarks that this is not compatible with windows

Update: Windows is now supported! https://github.com/sourcegraph/thyme/pull/12

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