Fuzzy Time (and an updating bash prompt)

So today's the Solemnity of the Assumption, which means this freelancer takes the day off. And what better way to spend free time than to take time to blog about time? About altering your very conception of time. In short, about fuzzy time.

"Fuzzy time" means using phrases like "half past three" and "quarter to one" instead of 3:37 or 12:41. This casual rounding happens all the time in conversation, but internally, I at least tend to watch the minute hand, if not the second hand. What does that do to my sense of time passing?

You may suppose me, for the sake of argument, sitting at lunch in one of those quick-lunch restaurants in the City where men take their food so fast that it has none of the quality of food...They all wore tall shiny hats as if they could not lose an instant even to hang them on a peg, and they all had one eye a little off, hypnotised by the huge eye of the clock. In short, they were the slaves of the modern bondage, you could hear their fetters clanking. Each was, in fact, bound by a chain; the heaviest chain ever tied to a man--it is called a watch-chain.

Chesterton, "The Angry Street"

I remember my Spanish teacher explaining that when North Americans are waiting for someone, they get irritated in five-minute increments, but Central Americans tend to get irritated in increments of a half hour. Of course, as a freelancer on a computer, the tardiness I'm generally fuming at is my own. That's an awful lot of angry energy to be wielding all the day long; I'm on both the giving and the receiving end.

A computer is singularly equipped to provoke this malaise because a tiny clock can be so conveniently placed in constant view. Chesterton, I think, would have turned his screen clock off entirely, with a mild oath, but I decided to try a pleasant compromise. More than a compromise, perhaps; for already my fuzzy clocks are getting me to think in terms of "five to ten" and "half past six". With no clock at all, I'd probably still be incessantly wondering (and checking) the "real" time.

I first found out about fuzzy time during the brief fuzzy-headed time when I was running KDE. The clock on the KDE panel has a fuzzy time setting. I don't remember the exact way to set it, but I'm sure you can find out how easily enough if you want. There may be similar settings on Windows and Mac applications. I saw at least one "Fuzzy Clock" Mac app in my searches. But of course I must leave that sort of thing to those who want it.

A fuzzy clock for Firefox

If you spend a lot of time browsing, Firefox is a great place to put your first fuzzy clock. The Fuzzy Time addon puts a "fuzzy clock" in your status bar. You can set the fuzziness level, and even learn a little bit of Spanish or Hebrew by choosing a different locale.

A fuzzy clock on your bash prompt.

But if you spend lots of time on the command line, you'll want fuzzy time on the prompt. First, we'll need a command line tool that simply spits out the current fuzzy time, and there's already a great one in Python. I'm not sure I found the site of the original source, but I got myself a copy of fuzzyclock here (sig) and it works. It installs like any normal Python script, and also lets you set the fuzziness level.

`fuzzyclock`

gives you the time in a five-minute increment, while

`fuzzyclock -f 2`

gives a fifteen-minute increment, and

`fuzzyclock -f 3`

only tells the hour. I'll leave level 4 for you to discover.

Now, how do we get this to show on our prompt? The default bash prompt is usually something like:

`you@yourhost $`

Of course, you can set this to something more interesting by setting the PS1 variable. You can try it right now with

`export PS1="Hi, Mom, I'm in \w and it's \t $ "`

Usually, this variable is set in your $HOME/.bashrc or $HOME/.bash_profile or whatever gets sourced when you log in. The \w prints your current working directory, and the \t prints the time. If you fire up man bash and scroll down to PROMPTING, you'll find all kinds of neat codes you can use in PS1 to give you other updated information. This is probably worth a look if you've never customized your prompt. You can even do colors (though that's another post).

Until recently, I'd had the prompt displaying the "real" time for years. Every command reiterated the current minute, and it could start to feel like a death by a thousand cuts.

So how can we replace this with the soothing continuity of fuzzy time?

[UPDATE 2010 Feb 08 -- Originally, this post discussed using the bash variable PROMPT_COMMAND. Thanks to a comment from Alex, (see below), you can skip PROMPT_COMMAND entirely.

I was doing this:

`PROMPT_COMMAND='export PS1="\u$( fuzzyclock ) $"'`

but it's much more elegant to do this:

`export PS1="\u\$( fuzzyclock ) $"`

In the second command, $() is escaped, so it actually runs every time $PS1 is displayed. Thanks, Alex!]

The problem with running fuzzyclock every time you hit Enter is that there's a slight delay. This gets frustrating quickly. Also, unless you only run one command every fifteen minutes, it seems out of line with the overall fuzzy time concept to keep checking the time.

Fortunately, bash can cat a short file very quickly. (It could probably display an environment variable even more quickly, but, embarrassingly, I couldn't get that to work with a cron job.) So all we need to do is write a short script that saves the current time in a short file, and then use cron to run that script every minute (or fifteen). Then, we use PROMPT_COMMAND to display this short file whenever we get a prompt.

First, in your $HOME/.bashrc (or $HOME/.bash_profile):

`export PS1="\u\$( cat $HOME/.cronprompt ) $ `

Put whatever else you want in that PS1, remember.

Then in your crontab file (perhaps $HOME/.crontab):

`*/1 * * * * /PATH/TO/cronprompt.sh &> /dev/null`

*/1 means once a minute, which I think is often enough for our fuzzy purposes. You could run it every five minutes (*/5) if you're extremely jealous of wasted CPU cycles. The &> /dev/null is rather important, unless you want an confirmation email every minute.

Don't forget to update cron by

`crontab $HOME/.crontab`

or wherever your put your crontab file. Just changing your crontab file won't do anything without actually running crontab on it. You can check that it "took" with crontab -l.

You'll need cronprompt.sh actually to be where you told cron it is. This script can be as short as one line:

`echo ": {$( fuzzyclock )}" > $HOME/.cronprompt`

Whenever cron runs cronprompt.sh, .cronprompt is updated. Thanks to our setting for $PROMPT_COMMAND above, .cronprompt gets output afresh every time you get a prompt.

You can use this cronprompt.sh concept to add other cool updated information, such as a reminder using remind, but I'm going to save that for another post.

(Note: after I did all this, I found a script called uberprompt, which seems to have a similar approach for setting a prompt title on the fly, but I didn't try it.)

A fuzzy clock for Vim

Now that you've gone to all this trouble to have fuzzy time on the command line, why not put it on the status line in Vim?

In your $HOME/.vimrc:

"fuzzytime
function! Cronprompt() 
    "Note that you must change YOU to your user name.
    "For some reason, $HOME doesn't expand in .vimrc, at least for me.
    for line in readfile("/home/YOU/.cronprompt",'',1)
        return line
    endfor
endfunction
se  statusline=%-5F %m%r%w%y%=%{strftime('%a %e %b %I:%M %p')}%6L%{'L'}%3{' b'}%n %{Cronprompt()} (%l,%c)%5P

Again, note that you must change YOU to your user name, so that Vim can find .cronprompt. You don't need all that stuff I have in statusline, just %{Cronprompt()} (though you probably want handy items like the name of the file you're editing). I just thought I'd show you my statusline. Note that I've kept a strftime function that includes the conventional time too. This might defeat the purpose, but presently I still time my work day, and sometimes the Vim clock helps because it stays "frozen" if I get up from the computer. Maybe fuzzy time will help me stop this habit. But see :h statusline if you want to customize this arcane variable.

Go forth and saunter

I wouldn't be surprised to find that if there were some way of totaling the amount of time I sometimes spend worrying over and checking the time, it would come to fifteen minutes or even a half hour a day. Like all slaveries, a hyper time sense might turn out to be inefficient, even by its own standards. I like fuzzy time so far, and I hope you give it a try.