A personal time tracker for terminal users

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tiktak will help you keep track of time you spent on different activities—probably projects. It keeps its time records in ridiculous simple text files. This should help if it comes to use your time records for some more fancy application or keep them in a VCS repo, etc.

Disclaimer

The data generated by this program is collected and computed with best effort for correctness. There is no guarantee for the fitness of that data for any specific purpose! Don't blame any author of the software if numbers you get from the program are incorrect in any way.

Getting Started

• Get you the tiktak executable by
  • Downloading a binary distribution from Github or
  • If you have a Go SDK installed using the idiomatic go install git.fractalqb.de/fractalqb/tiktak/cmd/tiktak@latest
• Put the tiktak executable in your path. (You pretend to be a terminal user, i.e. I won't have to explain…)
• tiktak will store its files in $HOME/.local/share/fqb/tiktak on UN!X like systems if $HOME/.local/share exists. On Windows, files go into %HOME%\AppData\Roaming\fqb\tiktak. Otherwise tiktak stores files in '.'.
• If you decide to keep files somwhere else, set the TIKTAK_DATA environment variable to the directory of your liking.
• Start working on something cool, i.e. type tiktak /something/cool in your terminal. This will start the subtaks cool withing its parent task something.
• Do some miscellaneous work you want to account on the global level and type tiktak /
• After a while go back to work on something by typing tiktak something. Note that you don't need to type a slash '/' because tiktak will find the already known task /something.
• 32 minutes later, check the time collected, i.e. type tiktak

SUMS: Sat, 01 Apr 2023; Week 13:                                   
-------------------------------------------------------------
Task             Today.  Today/  Week.  Week/  Month.  Month/
-------------------------------------------------------------
/something/cool   00:19       -  00:19      -   00:19       -
/something        00:31   00:50  00:31  00:50   00:31   00:50
/                 00:29   01:20  00:29  01:20   00:29   01:20

• This is enough work for today, say tiktak -zzz
• Check the recorded time spans in detail: titkat -r spans

Wed, 05 Apr 2023; Week 14                   
  10:40:09  10:59:12  00:19  /something/cool
  10:59:12  11:28:36  00:29  /              
  11:28:36  12:00:01  00:31  /something

• You can also get a time sheet for the current month showing accumulated time for something, including subtasks and the rest by typing tiktak -r sheet /something /

SHEET: Sat, 01 Apr 2023 – Sat, 01 Apr 2023                                 
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Day          Start  Stop   Break  Work   /something  /something/cool      /
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Wed, 05 Apr  10:40  12:00  00:00  01:20       00:31            00:19  00:29
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
   Average:  10:40  12:00  00:00  01:20       00:31            00:19  00:29
     Count:      1   Sum:  00:00  01:20       00:31            00:19  00:29

• Now comes the point where you think "Nice! But what can I do with this?". I'd suggest you write your time sheet into a CSV file to import it with some spreadsheet program: tiktak -r sheet -layout csv -formats c /something /

SHEET: Wed, 05 Apr 2023 – Wed, 05 Apr 2023;;;;;;;
Day;Start;Stop;Break;Work;/something;/something/cool;/
Wed, 05 Apr;10:40;12:00;00:00;01:20;00:31;00:19;00:29
Average:;10:40;12:00;00:00;01:20;00:31;00:19;00:29
Count:;1;Sum:;00:00;01:20;00:31;00:19;00:29

Detailed Docs

Build from Source

• Be sure to have Go SDK installed. The most recent one should work. In case of doubt, the minimum required version is in go.mod.

• Clone the repo: git clone https://github.com/fractalqb/tiktak.git

• Enter the project dir: cd tiktak

• Run go run mk/mk.go and find the executables in ./cmd/tik*

• To use Go's standard install, run go run mk/mk.go -install

Locating time record files

tiktak keeps its files in a single directory. If you don't do nothing, tiktak has OS-specific strategies to locate these files. If you use tiktak -h you will find the query option that can show you the tiktak data directory: tiktak -q dir

To control the directory yourself, set the TIKTAK_DATA environment variable to the directory of your choice. Inside that directory you will find:

• Files named yyyy-mm.tiktak that store your tasks of month mm in year yyyy. tiktak creates them depending on the current time.

• An optional file tiktak.yaml (not .yml) with your tiktak configuration – if you created one.

• An optional file template.yaml. If tiktak has to create a new monthly file it will first copy the contents of template.yaml unchanged into the new file. One might use it to have some preconfigured tasks that are needed every month.

Setting now

Filters

Migrating old files with tikmig