Timetracker-csv

Pandas-friendly time tracking from the CLI, repo by repo

┌────────────────────────────┐
│ 🕒 Timetracker CLI Tool │
│ Track time → CSV → pandas │
└────────────────────────────┘

Track time spent on multiple projects,
one repo at a time from the CLI
Time is saved in
pandas-friendly
plain text CSV files.
CSV files for each project can be combined into a single CSV file for analysis and plotting.

Advantages
Quickstart
Installation
Other time-trackers
Documentation
Issues and feedback

Advantages

Freedom: Libre Software (aka open-source)
Simple: Quick to set up
Privacy: Own your data
Anti-stalking: No invasive tracking ever of keystrokes, browser activity, mouse-clicks, etc.,
as is done by multitudinous other timetracking apps
Human-and-machine-readable: ASCII data stored in CSV (comma-separated values) plaintext files:
- Ready for pandas, the Python Data Analysis Library for tabular data
- Editable using many editors, including vim and Notepad++
Flexible: Modify your data if you forget to log time
Quickview:
- Current task being recorded
- Elapsed time spent on the current task
No clicking and clicking and clicking on a GUI
Go off-line: No required use of the internet or cloud-based services
Data field support: Data supported for each time interval includes:
- A required free-form descriptive message
- An optional activity or type
- Any number of optional tags
Plays nice: Export data for import by external time-tracking viewers

Quickstart

The name used by this time tracker is determined by the USER environmental variable by default.

1) Initialize a timetracker project

$ cd ~/projects/meetinghouse

$ trk init
Initialized timetracker directory: /home/bez/projects/meetinghouse/.timetracker

2) Start the timer

$ trk start
Timetracker started now: Mon 09:00 AM: 2025-03-24 09:00:00

3) Stop the timer

$ trk stop -m 'Received architectural plans'
Timer stopped at Mon 2025-03-24 12:00:00 PM
Elapsed H:M:S 0:03:00 appended to timetracker_meetinghouse_bez.csv

4) Report my time units for this project

$ trk report
Day  Date        Span     Total  Description
Sun  2025-03-24  03:00    03:00  Received architectural plans

You can also get the total hours that you spent on a project:

$ trk hours
0:03:00 H:M:S or 3.000 hours

Installation

Install with timetracker-csv pip:

$ pip install --upgrade timetracker-csv

Or install from source:

$ git clone git@github.com:dvklopfenstein/timetracker.git
$ cd timetracker
$ pip install .

Other timetrackers

700+ stars Bartib
740+ stars timetrace
13k stars ActivityWatch
85 stars ti
44 stars tim
6 stars Jupyter timetracker uses aTimeLogger CSV format
https://atimelogger.pro/ CSV files
List of timetrackers in PyPi
web-based time tracking application
Wage Labor record:
- jupyter-timetracker - GUI too complex/too close to DB editing tools. No support for clients
- tim CLI only, no idle time detection but uses hledger as a backend!
- salary-timetracker CLI only, tracking bound to git repos, fixed hourly rate but hey it uses CSV files!
- ttrac CLI only, no idle time detection, no support for clients or tasks but uses JSON files!
- tickertock only with a StreamDeck, wants to use cloud service as backend but uses a hardware interface!
- mttt CLI only, no idle time detection but uses plain text files!
- tt-cli CLI only, no idle time detection, no support for clients
- timetracker CLI only, no idle time detection, no support for clients
- 1k stars hamster comes pretty close but seems outdated/abandoned and a little bit too complex

dvklopfenstein/timetracker