A Go application launched from shell to display a menu timer for macOS.

It uses zenith to display the 'Timer is finished' dialog and notification plus menuet to display the menu timer.

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It's probably better to implement this directly in Swift to hide the 'Start at Login' and 'Quit' menu items.

Features

• Multiple timers are supported (just launch a new tab in iTerm because launching this from shell is blocking)
• Menu timer keeps counting once it reaches 0 (useful when the initial countdown was missed)
  • This is displayed with a minus like -3,33 in the menu
• When quit by Enter from the shell, it displays the remaining time (don't use Ctrl+C)
  • Registering any signals does not work with menuet apparently

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Inspired by https://github.com/kristopherjohnson/MenubarCountdown which I previously used and liked, but I wanted to invoke the countdown from shell and customize it more.

Digging into the Objective C was not worth the effort for me, so I just redid this in Go.

Installation

Once the timer is finished, an audo file named you-can-heal.mp3 in the same directory as the application is played via afplay.

The you-can-heal.mp3 audio is cut from the end of the Medical Medium's Brain Meditation.

Install by go get github.com/Gira-X/macos-menu-countdown

This builds the application in $GOBIN named macos-menu-countdown which is really not a nice name, so feel free to rename it to countdown or tim (which I use personally).

Then move the you-can-heal.mp3 audio file from this repository into $GOBIN.

Usage

> countdown
 ,15       (15 seconds)
  25       (25 minutes)
  25,      (25 minutes)
  25,20    (25 minutes and 20 seconds)
  1,25,120 (1 hour, 25 minutes and 120 seconds)

> countdown 15
Hit Enter to cancel >

00:14:59 left...

I rarely use the options to set seconds or hours, so I usually run it like countdown 15 to set a timer for 15 minutes.

Caveats

There is the issue with the menuet library that it does not have any functionality to remove the 'Start at Login' and 'Quit' menu items or register any click events on them.

This is especially problematic because clicking the 'Quit' menu item correctly quits the countdown application but still leaves the caffeinate -i process (started in a Goroutine) running. caffeinate -i prevents system sleep and it is not good to keep it running without any reason.

Registering a signal to catch the 'Quit' click causes an internal panic with menuet.

So do not click the 'Quit' menu item!

If you still did, call pkill caffeinate to kill the process correctly.