Trak: track chunks of time from the command line

Trak, v0.0.4 (May 1, 2012) Written by Adam Sharp

Trak was recently a Perl script. It has been ported to Ruby, but the code really looks like it's taken a beating and is definitely NOT what I want it to ultimately look like. Much more ruby-fying to happen yet, as well as support for the excellent Chronic gem for natural language date parsing in the pipeline.

It's now structured as a RubyGem and should hopefully be available on RubyGems soon.

Stay tuned.

Trak is a utility that allows you to quickly make a record of how much time you've spent on various tasks throughout the day.

Work logs are stored in /Users/yourusername/Documents/Tracker/ with the format YEAR-MONTH-DAY-time-log.txt.

An example work log that trak will create:

2011-09-01 9:00
30: nap
45: procrastinate
30: uni
120: trak

Trak is available from RubyGems:

$ gem install trak

trak [-d|--date DATE] ##<denom> <description>  # => data entry
trak [-d|--date DATE] [-r|-l]                  # => reporting
trak [-d|--date DATE] -e                       # => manually edit time log

Where:

• ## is a decimal signifying how much time has been spent.
• <denom> is either hours (h/hr/hour/hours) or minutes (m/min/minute/minutes). <denom> is optional and if ommitted, Tracker will interpret the time entered as minutes.
• <description> is a string containing a brief description of the activity.
• DATE is a string of the format YYYY-MM-DD which represents any date. This effects any of Tracker's modes, i.e., insertion, editing or reporting.

You can use either

$ trak 30 "Foo bar"

or

$ trak 30 Foo bar

as everything after the first argument is considered the name of the task.

These are all valid commands:

$ trak 1h Write trak documentation       # => 1 hour
$ trak 30min Rewrite trak documentation  # => 30 minutes
$ trak 4hours Refactor trak              # => 4 hours
$ trak 15 Lunch                          # => 15 minutes