otto-aa / aw-watcher-terminal

Terminal watcher for the free open-source tracking tool ActivityWatch

aw-watcher-terminal [Unmaintained]

Extension to ActivityWatch which allows you to track the commands you've written and time spent in terminals.

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Features

Tracking commands and metadata

Automatically track following data for every command execution:

• the executed command
• path of the shell
• shell name
• exit code of the command
• execution time
• session id (automatically created)

Tracking activity time

For simpler analysis on how long you've worked in the terminal (and in which directories and paths) this data is stored in a separate bucket. Following data is tracked there:

• shell name
• path
• session id

Restoring specific terminal sessions (Not implemented yet)

With the data stored it is theoretically possible to write all commands executed in a specific terminal session into a file. This feature is not yet implemented.

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Installation

Prerequisites

You need to have ActivityWatch installed.

Install aw-watcher-terminal

git clone https://github.com/otto-aa/aw-watcher-terminal.git
cd aw-watcher-terminal
make build

Install the appropriate watcher for your shell

If your preferred shell is missing, feel free to file an issue or create the shell watcher on your own (see docs).

• bash or zsh

Start aw-watcher-terminal

# If the aw-server is not started yet (e.g. by aw-qt), then start it in a separate terminal
aw-server

# Start the terminal watcher
aw-watcher-terminal

Currently, you can pass it the flags --testing for using the test server and --verbose for more detailed logging

Note: If you want it to autostart with aw-qt, take a look at this this issue

Open a new terminal and start executing commands

echo "Finished installation"

aw-watcher-terminal's Issues

Enhance documentation

• General information about aw-watcher-terminal (what it tracks; some link to activitywatch)
• Standards for the individual events (args; order of execution; necessity of events)
• Documentation on how to create a new shell-specific watcher (fifo-path; string escaping; async)
• Contributing
• Code of conduct
• License

Add a PID file so only one instance of aw-watcher-terminal is needed

Seems to me like you currently start a aw-watcher-terminal instance for each terminal which is opened. Since you are using one-way communication via fifo-files multiple instances should not be needed.

I am suggesting to use the activity watch data dir (.local/share/activitywatch/aw-watcher-terminal on linux, accessible via aw-core.dirs.get_data_dir) for both the fifo-file and a pid-file. Then we can check every time aw-watcher-terminal starts if a aw-watcher-terminal process is already running and if it is we can simply just utilize that instance and its fifo-file instead. This should also fix issues on multi-user systems when you have the fifo file in /tmp.

Issues section links are broken

Need to change/remove the links to the issue sections as the relative link /issues doesn't work.

Create test suites and implement continous integration

• Test suites
• Travis-CI (Done in #8)

Send heartbeats on activity

Whenever an event is triggered, the watcher should send a heartbeat to the server so one can easily track the time spent in terminals.

Data to send:

• process id
• shell
• path