v0.33.0: A timer on the command line

👤 Ton Kersten

Logging time afterwards means reconstructing your day: when did that call start, how long was the server migration really? A timer you start when you begin and stop when you’re done takes the guessing out. v0.33.0 adds one, on the command line.

Start, stop, done

warmdesk-timer start Website -m "homepage"   # a board project brings its own customer
warmdesk-timer status                        # Running: Website (Acme) — homepage — since 09:03, 1h 12m
warmdesk-timer stop                          # Booked 1h 15m on Website (Acme)

Stopping books the time as ordinary time entries, so they appear in the weekly grid, the calendar, and every report, and you can edit them there like any other entry.

  • Names are forgiving. Matching ignores case, and any unique part of a name is enough: web finds Website. If a name fits several projects, the tool lists them; add -c with the customer to pick one. warmdesk-timer projects shows everything you can book on.

  • Switching tasks is one command. Starting a new timer books the running one first.

  • Rounded up to 15 minutes. A timer of 1 to 15 minutes books 15, 50 minutes books an hour.

  • Split at midnight. A timer that runs past midnight becomes one entry per day.

  • Forgot to stop? warmdesk-timer stop --at 17:30 books up to 17:30 instead of now. cancel throws a timer away without booking anything.

The timer lives on the server, not on your laptop: start it on one computer and stop it on another, and a reboot doesn’t lose it.

Because every timer is rounded up on its own, an entry can end a little after the next timer started. The minutes are what you asked for; the calendar just shows the two entries side by side for a while.

Getting it

  • The Linux desktop .deb and .rpm install it as /usr/bin/warmdesk-timer.

  • It’s in the server download.

  • For everything else there’s a single file for Linux, macOS, and Windows, on amd64 and arm64, on the download page.

It needs your server’s address and a personal API key from Settings → API Keys, in WARMDESK_URL and WARMDESK_API_KEY or a small timer.yaml. The details are in Timer from the command line in the User Guide. For your own integrations, the API behind it is documented in the API reference.

Also fixed

The time-tracking calendar drew an entry that ends exactly at midnight as an overnight entry, with a small stray block at the top of the next day. It now ends where it should.

Upgrade

Download v0.33.0 from the download page or pull the latest release tag. The timer’s table is created automatically on startup.