Trak: track chunks of time from the command line

Trak, v0.0.2 (Apr 26, 2012)
Written by Adam Sharp

Notice

Trak was recently (i.e., last week) a Perl script. It has been ported to Ruby, but the code really looks like it's taken a beating and is definitely NOT what I want it to ultimately look like. Much more ruby-fying to happen yet, as well as support for the excellent Chronic gem for natural language date parsing in the pipeline.

It's now structured as a RubyGem and should hopefully be available on RubyGems soon.

Stay tuned.

Description

Trak is a utility for Mac OS X that allows you to quickly make a record of how much time you've spent on various tasks throughout the day.

Work logs are stored in /Users/yourusername/Documents/Tracker/ with the format YEAR-MONTH-DAY-time-log.txt.

An example work log that trak will create:

2011-09-01 9:00
30: nap
45: procrastinate
30: uni
120: trak

Installation

Trak is available from RubyGems:

$ gem install trak

Usage

trak [-d|--date DATE] ##<denom> <description>  # => data entry
trak [-d|--date DATE] [-r|-l]                  # => reporting
trak [-d|--date DATE] -e                       # => manually edit time log

Where:

  • ## is a decimal signifying how much time has been spent.
  • <denom> is either hours (h/hr/hour/hours) or minutes (m/min/minute/minutes). <denom> is optional and if ommitted, Tracker will interpret the time entered as minutes.
  • <description> is a string containing a brief description of the activity.
  • DATE is a string of the format YYYY-MM-DD which represents any date. This effects any of Tracker's modes, i.e., insertion, editing or reporting.

Descriptions

You can use either

$ trak 30 "Foo bar"

or

$ trak 30 Foo bar

as everything after the first argument is considered the name of the task.

Entering time

These are all valid commands:

$ trak 1h Write trak documentation       # => 1 hour
$ trak 30min Rewrite trak documentation  # => 30 minutes
$ trak 4hours Refactor trak              # => 4 hours
$ trak 15 Lunch                          # => 15 minutes

To do

  • Proper handling of incorrectly formatted dates
  • Write a report that gives a weekly breakdown given a date in that week
  • Add a -h usage/help switch
  • Make the personal time search more configurable by putting keywords to search in an array

  • Have the different types of reports, and keywords for those reports, completely stored in a configuration file. The last category in the file is the default report. Because keywords for custom reports would work on a whitelist system, everything that doesn't match goes into the default. For example:

    # Personal
lunch
uni
news
# Default
Work

  • Have the keywords in the configuration file actually be regexes. When reading the config file, any empty lines or whitespace are ignored.

  • Give an estimate of completion time, with a configurable default for the length of the work day. Also take into account the default length of lunch break (configurable) if lunch hasn't yet been logged.