A simple command line program to help keep track of work time by storing data in a simple per-week text file. It is designed for the use case where you have flexible work hours, but wish to keep track that you work a certain number of hours per week. By default, it assumes that you work 8 hours per day, 5 days per week, but this can be configured.
Run tracker start to start working. It might look like this (I use $ here to represent your shell prompt):
$ tracker start
[monday 2024-01-08]
* 08:28-
As you later end a shift, run tracker stop.
$ tracker stop
[monday 2024-01-08]
* 08:28-11:40
Use tracker report to show your progress.
$ tracker report
You have worked 3 h 12 m today.
You have worked 3 h 12 m this week.
Balance: -4 h 48 m
The balance tells you that you have 4 hours and 48 minutes left to work this day in order to be in balance.
While the normal mode of operation is to use tracker start and tracker stop to track your shifts, you may find that you sometimes forget to start your shift, or otherwise make an error that you wish to correct. Instead of offering a specific user interface to do such edits, tracker lets you open the data file for the current week in your text editor of choice (following the EDITOR environment variable) by using tracker edit.
Here is an example of what a file might look like after two days of tracking:
[monday 2024-01-08]
* 08:28-11:40
* 12:30-17:00
[tuesday 2024-01-09]
* 08:13-12:00
* 13:06-14:40
* 15:01-16:34
Each day starts with the week day and ISO-formatted date in square brackets. (The duplication in information is intentional, to make it easier to read the file.) Each shift is represented by a line starting with an asterisk, followed by the start and end time in 24-hour format, separated by a hyphen.
Comments can be written in the file using lines starting with #.
Tracker will only look at the current week file when stating your report. If you wish to transfer a balance from a previous week, it can be done by adding a line like this to the top of the current week file:
* balance 3h 12m
This will add 3 hours and 12 minutes to the balance for the current week.
(Under development: Such as balance shift will be added automatically when you start a new week.)
This program is, as far as I'm aware, only used by myself. Please file an issue if this is no longer the case, I would love to know! If you wish to install it, you would have to set up a Rust development environment and run cargo install in the root of the repository. I would also recommend setting up the shell completions – take a look in the file install.sh for how to do this – and setting up some nice aliases, for example work for tracker start.
tracker can be customized with a configuration file. Currently, you can set the number of hours in a work day and the number of work days in a week. The location of the file is system-dependent; on Linux, it is expected to be located at ~/.config/tracker/config.toml. Here is an example of what it might look like:
[workweek]
days_per_week = 4 # Defaults to 5
hours_per_day = 6 # Defaults to 8There are many time tracking tools out there. Here are some open source alternatives.
CLI-based:
Browser-based: