Comment by aasasd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aasasd | Hacker News Reader

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Hmmm. Personally I'm currently using Toggl: even though the backend is proprietary, the Mac tool is lightweight, well designed and, curiously, open source. However, I could use some divorce from proprietary services sucking up my detailed time records.

Could anyone please comment as to how Org-clock's recording interface compares to Toggl? Especially, can it respect me going afk and count it as a break after five minutes? Toggl has a great dialog for this, amounting to ‘stop or continue.’ As for the reporting side, I mostly need just a summary of my time-wasting achievements over a week.

I suppose that Org-clock doesn't leave the confines of Emacs itself? Which must limit its abilities in measuring the activity.

See the variable "org-clock-idle-time". This is Emacs, so of course there is an option.

I'm not sure if I would use org-clock unless I were already programming in Emacs, but since that's mostly what I'm doing, it works great to keep track of contracting time.

Now that I think of it, system-wide idle time is available on Macs via a terminal command, or on the three platforms with a few lines of C (https://github.com/anaisbetts/node-system-idle-time). So I guess that's solvable. A system-wide popup might be harder, though.

Personally I could see myself using org-clock in isolation, even if just for the fact that I end up with a non-proprietary log. I've lost too much history to various different tools (some of them turned out less than ideal, some just went belly-up).

It's difficult to know though, because I started using org-clock alongside org-mode, and if you combine time-tracking with outlining, journalling, todo/project management, and a calendar, all of it well integrated, it's hard to imagine switching to something else.

EDIT: also, just remembered that one reason I quite using Toggl was that clocktables turned out much more powerful for analyzing/reporting my hours.

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