Idle detection

[wu-lee]

Without idle detection in a time tracking app, I tend to get a regular headache when I realise the timer has been running all night.

I need something which pops up a modal dialog and says:

You appear to have stopped working. Do you want to
a) Keep the elapsed time and continue timing?
b) Discard the elapsed time and continue timing?
b) Discard the elapsed time and stop timing?

And this needs not be dismissed or lost simply by clicking outside the dialog.

I'm investigating TimeLight, and was hoping it had decent idle detection, it being a desktop tray app. I've my own plasmoid widget which works on Kubuntu, is a bit like clockify, and does idle detection. The mechanism is to use PlasmaCore.DataSource to call qdbus org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver /ScreenSaver org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver.GetSessionIdleTime and parse the result. clunky, but it works.

But on one of my projects I need to use Clockify now, which it doesn't support. I could implement that but probably with some loss of billable hours...

The Clockify web plugin (for Firefox, at least) does have idle detection of sorts, but it's very timid, so much so the notification is easily missed or dismissed by accident, and then I'm back to square one. Likewise the Clockify electron app seems unable to do it effectively. So I went looking for something which might be able to integrate with the Linux desktop better, and found TimeLight. This looks nice, but doesn't seem to have idle detection at all.

I might be able to implement support for idle-detection in TimeLight for Linux, with less effort than implementing the API in my plasmoid, but some advice and guidance would help. TimeLight is meant to be a cross-platform, and I'm not entirely sure I could reliably implement it on Windows or MacOS, since I don't have access to those OSes.

Any comments? Does this seem doable, relatively easily, or is it going to be tricky/unwanted, like #28 seems to be judged?