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Comment by almarklein | Hacker News Reader

Hi, I'm the author of TimeTagger. Thanks for your feedback. Right now you can click the record button and since a description is optional, click start right away.

Could you please elaborate how you would want this to be faster? A one click option, or perhaps a keyboard shortcut to start a timer? I'm eager to learn about potential workflows to make the experience more smooth :)

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This is a very interesting project and I'm looking forward to diving in over the coming weeks.

Why not immediately? Because I'm a happy user of ActivityWatch -- a fantastic similar tool, which, quoting the authors is " The best free and open-source automated time tracker. Cross-platform, extensible, privacy-focused."

I encourage you to check it out, if you haven't already. The pluggable and diverse watchers that AW uses are the true source of its power. It's under active development (donno why another comment claimed otherwise) and I've been using it on everything for 2 years now.

I can't wait to do a head between the two, and a writeup. I'm sure there are features that will "cross potentate" between the two projects

I'm the maintainer of ActivityWatch, and comments like this make me very happy!

Will check it out, and am looking forward to your writeup!

> Could you please elaborate how you would want this to be faster? A one click option, or perhaps a keyboard shortcut to start a timer? I'm eager to learn about potential workflows to make the experience more smooth :)

Something like ActivityWatch (open-source, non-functioning) or Timing (proprietary, functioning, for Mac): Keeps track of your app usage by app and app title and directory, automatically suggests tasks to make based on app usage.

Automated solutions like that seem really nice, but it's not possible for a web app to know much about what you're doing outside of the app itself.

Then don't make it a web app. Make a native app. Or a native app that sends the data to a web app via localhost websocket.

I'm the maintainer of ActivityWatch (happy to see it mentioned!) and automating the process of time tracking was why I started building it (along with frustrations I had with RescueTime).

Curious what you mean by 'non-functioning' here :)

1. When you go to edit an existing task and just click a suggested tag the edit button does not activate and it does not save unless you enter a space first. 2. Clicking on a tag on the right should work as a filter on the tasks. 3. Export to csv should have the tags in every row

Well done on releasing and going open source, great achievement.

Thanks for the feedback. 1. Is indeed a bug, will fix! 2. It does that, right? 3. Not sure if I follow. ATM the tags are in one cell, delimited by spaces.

2. If I filter by client1 on the right I can still see client2 records on the left, it would be my preference that they filter but thats just me.

3. Each individual row does not have the associated tags, if i'm exporting to csv I'm probably going to be opening in Excel to generate a graph or report

Thanks for the clarification! I see what you mean now. 1. I think I'd go with graying-out records that do not match the selected tags. 2. The tags are part of the description, but indeed this is hard to process further. We should add a column for just the tags.

> keyboard shortcut

Always a good start for any speed increase

Are you familiar with emacs and/or vi ?

Familiar as in I know them, and I occasionally use vi (over ssh), but not a proper user :) Anyway, I created an issue: https://github.com/almarklein/timetagger/issues/11

Improved support for using the keyboard, including keyboard shortcuts.

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