Chickadee: Project Timing from the Shell

Coming Soon: Chickadee

Chickadee is a tiny tool to let you analyze your time from the shell. Rather like old tt, except that you edit the records in your text editor; simple macros make it easy to insert the start and stop time for each project. Since it's a human-readable format, you can tweak the times if needed. Since it's a text file, you can make notes right there, and they'll be parsed out later. With a little vim syntax highlighting, you get something like this:

A chickadee source file in vim (colorscheme: lettuce)

With a lot of help from NoSQL, an amazing database tool for the shell (and an alias to 'c'), you can pop over to the command line and do something like:

$ c -b 21

==========================================================

 Starting on:     2007 Nov 21 Wed
 Ending on:       2007 Nov 27 Tue
 EXCLUDE parents: meals|household|personal|reading
 Sort on parent:

==========================================================
project         parent      thrs  tmin
--------------  ----------  ----  ----
+designing      bpalive        9    34
+backup         linux          1    00
+planning       wri            1    21
+chickadee      contrib        0    12
+email          social2009     0    04
+email          wri            0    03
+fixing         linux          0    16
+organizing     wri            0    07

[ Several lines removed...this _is_ my own schedule. ]

==========================================================

Totals:

tthrs  ttmin
-----  -----
   46     42  [ <-- This is "wrong" because it includes the removed lines. ]

==========================================================

Isn't that cool?

Not convinced? Consult the exhaustive documentation below.

Incidentally, I couldn't find a current home page for tt, but you can see their old page on archive.org. I used to use tt myself, but since the records were stored in epoch time, it was quite painful to change anything if you made any mistakes in your timing.

Why Chickadee?

Chickadees are small, fast, and tough. Unlike their bloated brethren, they can sing in the cold all winter long.

Download

Not yet. A few more kinks to work out. But let me know if you'd like to test drive a beta version.

Requirements

• NoSQL
• Bash shell, and basic GNU utilities. (Any sane Linux distro should be just fine.)

Recommended

• Vim, so you can edit your files with syntax highlighting and special macros to insert the timestamps and compute the intervals. However, you're welcome to craft this functionality in your own favorite text editor. I'd love to include it if you do.

Exhaustive Documentation

I'll get on it.