timer – a Pomodoro/Interval Timer

timer is a command line interval timer written in Bash.

NOTE/TODO: The README is out of date with this forked version.

Features

Calming, serene alert tone inspired by Buddhist meditation bells
Set a simple countdown, or specify a set of intervals to time
Repeat interval sets n times, or indefinitely

Tmux Interface

If in a tmux session, then the remaining duration is saved to the $TMUX_TIMER variable of the global tmux environment; do with this variable what you want (see man tmux for details). For instance, the author of this fork has the following line in his tmux configuration:

set -ga status-right "#{?TMUX_TIMER,⏲ #{TMUX_TIMER} ,}"

which displays the timer in the right status bar iff the variable is set.

Installation

macOS

via Homebrew

$ brew install rlue/utils/timer

Linux

Dependencies

bc
sox
libsox-fmt-mp3

Download timer to a directory on your $PATH (e.g., ~/bin, ~/.local/bin, /usr/local/bin) and make it executable:

$ curl -o ~/bin/timer https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rlue/timer/master/bin/timer
$ chmod +x ~/bin/timer

Usage

Synopsis

$ timer [options] [minutes ...]

    -r rounds                        Repeat timer (n < 0 repeats forever)
    -d seconds                       Delay timer start
    -q                               Suppress command line output
    -h                               Display this message
    -v                               Display version information

Timer duration may be specified in fraction or decimal form; e.g., 90 seconds may be specified as 1.5 or 3/2.

If multiple durations are specified, an alert will be triggered at the end of each interval.

Examples

Simple timer (30m)

$ timer 30

Meditation timer

From Quora:

Let’s say you meditate for 30 minutes. You can set the interval bell to ring after 5 minutes, so you can spend the first 5 minutes settling/relaxing yourself and your mind, and then begin the actual meditation practice when the interval bell rings.

$ timer 5 25

Pomodoro technique

From Wikipedia:

Decide on the task to be done.

Set the pomodoro timer (traditionally to 25 minutes).

Work on the task until the timer rings.

After the timer rings, put a checkmark on a piece of paper.

If you have fewer than four checkmarks, take a short break (3–5 minutes), then go to step 2.

After four pomodoros, take a longer break (15–30 minutes), reset your checkmark count to zero, then go to step 1.

$ timer 25 5 25 5 25 5 25 20

Or to repeat this 135-minute set twice in a row,

$ timer -r2 25 5 25 5 25 5 25 20

Tea timer

Use in conjunction with notify-send (or similar; this works on Ubuntu) to send desktop notification upon completion.

timer 3 && notify-send 'Tea time!'

Troubleshooting

timer uses sox under the hood to chime the bell. If you receive an error message that begins play WARN, it may mean that sox has selected the wrong audio driver or sound card (“audio device”) to play on.

When this happens, specifying the appropriate audio driver or device via an environment variable should fix the problem:

$ AUDIODRIVER=alsa timer 5

If this works, you can make this setting permanent either by defining a shell alias

# ~/.bashrc

alias timer="AUDIODRIVER=alsa timer"

or exporting the environment variable globally.

# ~/.profile

export AUDIODRIVER=alsa

abstrnoah / timer