eichhoernchen

Lightweight curses-based time tracking tool.

Table of Contents

1. Table of Contents
2. Features
3. Installation
4. Usage
5. Configuring Eichhörnchen
6. Exporting tasks

Features

• curses-based user interface
• time tracking functionality
  • starting/stopping tasks
  • adding/removing tasks
  • editing tasks
  • listing tasks
  • summing up of run time
  • summary of tasks
  • exporting tasks to CSV or JSON
• standard library only

Installation

To install Eichhörnchen using pip run the following command:

pip install eichhoernchen

Usage

usage: eichhoernchen [-h] [-c CONFIG] [--version]

Lightweight curses-based time tracking tool.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -c CONFIG, --config CONFIG
                        use this configuration file
  --version             show program's version number and exit

When inside the program use the help or ? commands to list available commands or help command to show the help message of the command command.

Use Control+C to close windows displaying choices (and thus aborting the related operation) or to exit the program.

Configuring Eichhörnchen

The default location of the configuration file is ~/.config/eichhoernchen.ini. An alternate configuration file can be specified using the -c/--config argument.

Minimum configuration

The configuration file is an INI file and needs to contain at least the following sections:

[database]
dbname = eichhoernchen.db
path = /home/user/.local/share

The dbname specifies the name of the SQLite3 database, and path specifies the path to the database file.

Aliases

To define aliases for the standard commands, add the aliases section containing key-value pairs defining one or more aliases per command:

[aliases]
list = ["ls"]
remove = ["rm", "rem"]

Exporting tasks

The tasks in the database can be exported to either CSV or JSON file format.

Exporting to CSV file format

When exporting to CSV file format, for each tag a task is associated with an entry is created. For example, the following list of tasks

~>list
21:32-21:32 2020-06-04(0h0m)foo[bar]
21:32-21:32 2020-06-04(0h0m)bar[foo]
21:32-21:32 2020-06-04(0h0m)foobar[bar][foo]
21:32-21:32 2020-06-04(0h0m)foo
21:32-21:32 2020-06-04(0h0m)bar
21:32-21:59 2020-06-04(0h27m)foobar

result in the following CSV file content

foo,bar,2020-06-04T21:32:19,2020-06-04T21:32:20
bar,foo,2020-06-04T21:32:31,2020-06-04T21:32:32
foobar,bar,2020-06-04T21:32:37,2020-06-04T21:32:39
foobar,foo,2020-06-04T21:32:37,2020-06-04T21:32:39
foo,,2020-06-04T21:32:43,2020-06-04T21:32:44
bar,,2020-06-04T21:32:45,2020-06-04T21:32:46
foobar,,2020-06-04T21:32:49,2020-06-04T21:59:38

To recreate the original list of tasks, the start time of the tasks can be used as it is unique.

Exporting to JSON file format

When exporting to JSON file format, the original tasks' structure is more or less preserved. For example, the following list of tasks

~>list
21:32-21:32 2020-06-04(0h0m)foo[bar]
21:32-21:32 2020-06-04(0h0m)bar[foo]
21:32-21:32 2020-06-04(0h0m)foobar[bar][foo]
21:32-21:32 2020-06-04(0h0m)foo
21:32-21:32 2020-06-04(0h0m)bar
21:32-21:59 2020-06-04(0h27m)foobar

results in the following JSON file content

[["foo", ["bar"], "2020-06-04T21:32:19", "2020-06-04T21:32:20"], ["bar", ["foo"], "2020-06-04T21:32:31", "2020-06-04T21:32:32"], ["foobar", ["bar", "foo"], "2020-06-04T21:32:37", "2020-06-04T21:32:39"], ["foo", [], "2020-06-04T21:32:43", "2020-06-04T21:32:44"], ["bar", [], "2020-06-04T21:32:45", "2020-06-04T21:32:46"], ["foobar", [], "2020-06-04T21:32:49", "2020-06-04T22:06:58"]]