arbtt

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Creation date: 2017-02-06
Last substantive revision date: 2017-02-06
Last modification date: 2022-05-16
Generated on: 2024-04-30

arbtt is the “automatic, rule-based time tracker”. It is a time-tracking program that runs in the background, recording which windows are open, which window has focus, and so on. It has a separate arbtt-stats command that displays the recorded information in various ways – the user is expected to write suitable rules so that the summary is interesting.

The documentation is pretty good, and will give an idea of what it can do:

Configuring the arbtt categorizer (arbtt-stats)
Effective Use of Arbtt (by gwern)

As gwern’s guide mentions, setting informative window titles is important. Most of my time on the computer is spent in a web browser or on a terminal. Both Firefox and Google Chrome already set good titles, so for me the challenge was mostly trying to make sure the terminal application I use sets titles correctly.

The configuration is split across three programs:

Vim, which sets the title correctly under urxvt without tmux, but fails to do so under urxvt with tmux.
tmux, which needs to be told to allow setting the title.
Bash, to use the prompt function feature to set the window title to the previously-run command.

Shorten tmux pane titles with this answer.

Potentially relevant is this.

Some problems:

For long commands, it’s problematic that the command that ran right before the long command is what gets displayed. For instance my music player is usually run once and lasts for days at a time in its own tmux window.
Possible security problems with escape sequences?
tmux 2.3 seems to offer the ability set the window title and pane title separately, but Ubuntu 16.10 has tmux 2.2, so the tmux status shows less useful information (although Vim does a good job of setting the title).
I like to keep my cursor in Google Chrome in Facebook chat while having the mouse pointer in a Firefox window. This allows me to scroll in Firefox and read while I’m talking to people, and also allows me to quickly respond by just typing (without the extra Alt-Tab). But arbtt only knows about the active window, so this will incorrectly record the time as all being in Facebook. In practice, I think this is a very small fraction of my day.

See also