Overview

buffer-timer is a utility to keep track of the time spent in a series of emacs buffers. You can then collectively group buffers into tasks and thus keep track of your overall time spent per project, for example.

Usage

Define your categories in a hierarchical manner:

(require 'buffer-timer)

; Example list of titles and regexps to group by.  This
(setq buffer-timer-regexp-master-list
  '(
    ("idle" . 
     (("generic" .			  "^\\*idle\\*")
      ("generic2" .			  "^\\*idle-2\\*")
      ("minibuf" .                        "^ \\*Minibuf-.*")))
    ("personal" .
     (("reading" .                        "lib/ebooks/")
      ("photography" .                    "images/capturedonearth")))
    ("work" .
      (("rocket engine project" .
        (("docs" .                        "src/rocket.*org")
         ("code" .                        "src/rocket.*\\(cpp\\|h\\)$")
         ("generic" .                     "src/rocket")))
       ("world peace" .
        (("project planning" .            "src/worldpeas/TODO")
         ("implementation" .              "src/worldpeas")))))
     ))

And then start editing like you normally would! At the end of the day, type C-c t m to get a summary of your time spent matched to the hierarchy.

History

Originally written for XEmacs, with a pretty “top (gutter) bar” it has since migrated to Emacs where it still is missing some of the original functionality. The button code and “top bar” functionality needs to be rewritten entirely.