Accessible time keeping/tracking

[Tim Chase]

> Does anyone know of an application for tracking time against a
> task/project that is accessible?  It can also be console based 

After playing with the other projects, I tossed together a 
command-line time-tracker with a little Python code in a couple 
hours.  It doesn't have a fancy installer, but it's just the one 
python file.  The only dependencies are Python and sqlite3. 
Python 2.5 comes with sqlite3, so that's an easy way to go.  It 
should also work in Python 2.4 as long as you've taken the extra 
step to get sqlite installed.

You can snag it at

   http://tim.thechases.com/bvi/tt.py

The "tt" stands for time-tracker.  To make it easy, you may want 
to put a link to it in your path.  Assuming /usr/local/bin is in 
your path, you can do the following as root:

   bash# cd /usr/local/bin
   bash# wget http://tim.thechases.com/bvi/tt.py
   bash# chmod ugo+x tt.py
   bash# ln -s tt.py tt

It has a feel much like CVS/Subversion/Mercurial/etc.  All the 
commands or of the form

   tt [options] ACTION [parameters]

You can have multiple projects, each of which have a variety of 
blocks of time associated with them (a block of time has a 
start-time, an optional end-time, and an optional description--if 
you're working on it, the end-time isn't set)

You start it up by using the INIT action:

   bash$ tt init

This will create ~/.timetracker/[username].db

This is just a sqlite3 DB, so you can use any SQL-aware tools for 
querying this that you want.  It also creates a default project, 
boringly called "Default".  If you want to specify the project 
name, you can do so on the command line:

   bash$ tt init "Spanish Inquisition"

It will automatically start the timer for your first task.  This 
task doesn't have any note associated with it, but you can 
include that too

   bash$ tt init "Spanish Inquisition" "Putting in comfy chair"

When you're done with a task, you can either move on to another 
task which will automatically stop the previous task:

   bash$ tt start "Poking with soft cushions"

Or you can explicitly stop whatever you're working on and start a 
new task later:

   bash$ tt stop

To add further projects, use the ADD command:

   bash$ tt add "Finding the Holy Grail"

You can list your available projects:

   bash$ tt ls
   1: Spanish Inquisition
   2: Finding the Holy Grail (current)

and you can list the tasks and the times taken for a given project

   bash$ tt ls 1
   [output follows]

The current project (the one to which START adds the next block 
of time) is shown in the output of the "ls" command.  If you want 
to start a task for the non-current project, you can just include 
the project # as the first argument:

   bash$ tt ls
   1: Spanish Inquisition
   2: Finding the Holy Grail (current)
   bash$ tt start 1 "Maniacal laughter"
   bash$ tt ls
   1: Spanish Inquisition (current)
   2: Finding the Holy Grail

When you're done with a project, you can mark it as deleted:

   bash$ tt del 1
   Deleted
   bash$ tt ls
   2: Finding the Holy Grail (current)

If you delete the current project, the most recently added 
project is made current, or it notifies you that you have no 
projects.  If you have no current project and attempt to START a 
task, it will notify you.

To show all projects, including deleted projects, use the "-a" or 
"--all" parameter:

   bash$  tt ls -a
   1: Spanish Inquistion (deleted)
   2: Finding the Holy Grail (current)

If you accidentally delete a project, you can undelete it:

   bash$ tt undelete 1
   bash$ tt ls
   1: Spanish Inquisition
   2: Finding the Holy Grail (current)

It also offers meager help, listing available actions:

   bash$ tt help

or you can ask for help on a particular item:

   bash$ tt help start

Most commands have alternatives as listed in the detailed help so 
"remove", "rm", "del", and "delete" all behave the same.  Case 
doesn't matter.

There are a couple other options to control date formatting, to 
override the database file, or to change the verbosity.  You can 
also force a database init, which will delete your existing 
database of tasks, and start afresh.

It's all pretty simple Python code, so if you want to tweak it, 
feel free.  Consider it in the public domain.  The code isn't 
overly elegant, as it issues direct SQL queries instead of using 
some abstraction/ORM layer, but none of the queries are anything 
too complex.  I threw it together in a couple hours.

Hope you find it helpful.  If you have questions, I'll try my 
best to answer them.

-tim