Elia Schito

Archive for the ‘Projects’ Category

Introducing TimeTap: unobtrusive time-tracking for TextMate

In GitHub, Programming, Projects, Ruby, TextMate, Time Tracking on October 4, 2010 at 9:41 am

TimeTap helps you track the time you spend coding on each project while in TextMate.

Once it’s launched you don’t have to bother anymore starting/stopping timers or inventing some arbitrary amount of time to fill your fancy time tracker.

How does it work

TimeTap keeps an eye on (tracks) the modification time of the frontmost file and tells you how much time you spent on each project.

If you stop coding for a while while squeezing your brains TimeTap understands. TimeTap will consider “coding time” pauses to up to 30 minutes between to saves in the same project.

Technically it saves a timestamp+path of the frontmost file in TextMate every 30 seconds, then it digests all this information in a nice Sinatra webapp.

The server will respond on http://0.0.0.0:1111/.

Instructions

Run ruby tap.rb or run rake launcher && launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents to add a plist for OSX’s launchd and have it launched automatically at login.

Setting up config file

timetap uses a config file to control where projects are kept, etc. Put this config file in ~/.tap_config.

cp config.yaml ~/.tap_config

Keys Explained

root - where the timetap logs should be saved. Recommended value: ~
code - where all you project live, in a flat hierachy.
nested_project_layers - see below, on nested projects. Default is 1

Nested Projects allows you to keep your projects inside a hierarchy, instead of the original assumption of timetap (which is that all projects are flat).

For example, you could keep your directory structure might look like:

~/Code/
  Clients/
    AcmeCorp/
      website/
        intranet
    BetaCorp/
      skunkworks/
  OpenSource/
    project_one/
    timetap/

A nested_project_layers setting of 2 (in your .tap_config file) would mean we track “AcmeCorp”, “BetaCorp”, and everything under OpenSource, as their own projects

Assumptions

  • You code on TextMate.
  • You save often (like me), at least every 30 minutes.
  • You keep your code organized (I use ~/Code as main code folder).

TODO

  • support other text editors, or at least make it easy to do so
  • (r)spec it!
  • make it more configurable
  • gemify (with jeweler)
  • flatten encoding quick-fixes with proper solutions (eat and spit only utf8)
  • integration with external (online) time tracking tools
  • export to csv (?)