TorWAL

Previously known as window-activity-logger, but as a friend pointed out, TorWAL was more fitting.

Yeah, so this is my Window Activity Logger (WAL, not an overload term at all!) - a tool to collect and make stats of your windows use (in Linux).

Example

$ torwal stats --since 2021-09-01 --before 2021-10-01
--- Top 10 uncategories ---
[...]
--- Top 10 active windows ---
[...]
--- Top 10 categories ---
 49h42m (31%) of Slack
 27h55m (18%) of Firefox (uncategorized)
 18h47m (12%) of Video Meeting
 15h19m (10%) of Firefox - Business internal documentaion tool
 10h36m (7%) of Terminal (uncategorized)
 10h13m (6%) of VIM (in dev folders)
 09h52m (6%) of Terminal (in dev folders)
 07h42m (5%) of Firefox - Monitoring stack tools
 04h54m (3%) of Firefox - Google Cloud Platform
 03h55m (2%) of Firefox - GitHub Pull Request
--- Active time (at all hours) ---
2021-09-01 (Wed):  08h04m ( 00h34m) |                    ▃▃▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▅▆▇▇▅▄▁▇▇▅       |
2021-09-02 (Thu):  06h40m (-00h49m) |                    ▆▇▇▇▇▆▇▇▇▇▇▇▅▇▇▂            |
2021-09-03 (Fri):  05h43m (-01h46m) |                     ▇▇▇▆▇▅▂▇▇▇▇▇▄▃ ▅           |
2021-09-04 (Sat):  00h00m
2021-09-05 (Sun):  00h23m ( 00h23m) |                                        ▄▂      |
2021-09-06 (Mon):  06h17m (-01h12m) |                     ▅▂▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▁          |
2021-09-07 (Tue):  07h03m (-00h26m) |                      ▄▇▇▅▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▃▆         |
2021-09-08 (Wed):  06h40m (-00h49m) |                     ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▄          ▁ |
2021-09-09 (Thu):  06h43m (-00h47m) |                    ▁▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇  ▂         |
2021-09-10 (Fri):  06h24m (-01h05m) |                    ▁▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▂             |
2021-09-11 (Sat):  00h00m
2021-09-12 (Sun):  00h00m
2021-09-13 (Mon):  08h26m ( 00h56m) |                    ▃▇▇▇▅▂▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▅▇▇▃        |
2021-09-14 (Tue):  08h07m ( 00h37m) |                    ▁▇▇▇▇▆▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▁▆▇▇▇▂▁       |
2021-09-15 (Wed):  08h56m ( 01h26m) |                      ▁▆▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▅▇▅▇▇▇▄   ▆▅  |
2021-09-16 (Thu):  08h08m ( 00h38m) |                    ▁▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▅▇▇▇          |
2021-09-17 (Fri):  05h03m (-02h26m) |                     ▇▁▂▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▂            |
2021-09-18 (Sat):  00h00m ( 00h00m) |                                       ▁        |
2021-09-19 (Sun):  00h51m ( 00h51m) |                                             ▆▁ |
2021-09-20 (Mon):  08h54m ( 01h24m) |    ▇▇▇▁              ▇▆▄▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ ▄▂      |
2021-09-21 (Tue):  06h59m (-00h30m) |                       ▅▇▇▇▇▇▆▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇          |
2021-09-22 (Wed):  08h13m ( 00h43m) |                      ▄▇▇▆▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▆▅▂    ▄▇▇▇▇▆▁▁|
2021-09-23 (Thu):  08h08m ( 00h38m) |                     ▆▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▅▂    ▂▇▁   |
2021-09-24 (Fri):  07h30m ( 00h00m) |                     ▃▇▇▇▇▇▇▂▆▇▃▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▃▁▁      |
2021-09-25 (Sat):  02h59m ( 02h59m) |                               ▃            ▄▁▇▇|
2021-09-26 (Sun):  03h22m ( 03h22m) |    ▇▇▇▇▆           ▄▇▄  ▁                      |
2021-09-27 (Mon):  08h13m ( 00h43m) |                    ▂▇▇▇▆▆▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▆▇▄▄▃        |
2021-09-28 (Tue):  04h53m (-02h36m) |                       ▃▄▇▃▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▅             |
2021-09-29 (Wed):  07h49m ( 00h19m) |                      ▅▇▇▇▆▇▇▇▇▇▂▃▆▆▇▇▅     ▃▇▆ |
2021-09-30 (Thu):  09h39m ( 02h09m) |                     ▄▇▇▇▆▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▅     |
 170h19m total
 05h19m off balance during this period

How it works

I personally use this for tracking work hours.

Each 10 seconds, or for each tick, I save a row in a SQLite3 database with the title of the currently active window on and for how long I've been inactive.

A tick counts as active time if you have been idle for less then IDLE_TIME (I use 5 min). If I attend a virtual meeting I use slightly higher thresholds, as virtual meetings tend to lead to some inactivity (from your window managers point of view).

Post-pandemic feature; IDLE_TIME is ignored for active time if I'm connected to the office WiFi.

I personally check if Slack is running, as a signal to whether I'm «working» or not. If i close Slack, i don't register active time. This is configurable. This has the side effect of making me more mindful about closing work related programs when I'm actually not working.

Usage

Register a tick

./wal.py reg

Stats

./way.py stats [--since YYYY-MM-DD] [--limit 20]

Support

The standard config and implementation does only support Linux and X window system, but feel free to add support for others, see this interface.

Installation

Requires python 3.5 or newer.

Only standard python libraries are in use, so no need for virtual envs. To get started:

cp config.py.example config.py
vim config.py
./wal.py

Crontab only have minutes as its smallest unit, and I wanted to collect data every 10th second. I could make it into a running daemon, but this was just the simplest way about:

crontab -e

and add

# m h  dom mon dow   command
* * * * * sleep 0; [/path/to/modern/python] /path/to/folder/wal.py reg
* * * * * sleep 10; [/path/to/modern/python] /path/to/folder/wal.py reg
* * * * * sleep 20; [/path/to/modern/python] /path/to/folder/wal.py reg
* * * * * sleep 30; [/path/to/modern/python] /path/to/folder/wal.py reg
* * * * * sleep 40; [/path/to/modern/python] /path/to/folder/wal.py reg
* * * * * sleep 50; [/path/to/modern/python] /path/to/folder/wal.py reg

To keep it more accessible i carry this alias in my .bashrc

alias torwal="/path/to/folder/wal.py"