Background
I'm looking for an app that can automatically record my app usage throughout the day so I can check back to see later what I've been up to, when, and for how long.
I really like the GUI of ManicTime. There are 3 timelines: App usage, document within the app (mainly getting it from the window title I presume), and computer status: Using/Away/Off.
But unfortunately the creators of ManicTime don't seem to be very interested in supporting Linux.
So far
I know about RescueTime, which comes the closest to what I am looking for. Its UI is not as detailed as I'd like. AFAIK there is no down-to-second timeline that I can explore. It is also concerning that all app usage is uploaded to the cloud. I'd prefer to keep that data local.
Click based (manual) time trackers I am not interested in. I'm quite certain I'd forgot to start and stop tracking. And even if I wouldn't it would definitely be much less detailed data than an automated solution.
Is there an app that is similar that I may not be aware of?
Is there a way to make ManicTime work with wine reliably?
Making it
It shouldn't be too hard to make, actually. We just need 2 ingredients:
- A way to get current window title/active application from the background transparently, without disturbing the user
- GUI to render collected data
I thought (1.) may be a technical challenge, but apparently that is not so: https://superuser.com/questions/382616/detecting-currently-active-window
(2.) is much more straightforward once we have our database with usage data in it, but it can also be labor-intensive to make a UI that is similarly polished as ManicTime.
Who would be interested in an open source project to implement this together? :) Maybe even with Functional Reactive Programming library in Haskell? :)
Misc
I'm mainly looking for (free and) open source software, but I'd like to know if such commercial and/or closed source software exists as well -- especially if no (F)OSS versions are available.
