Bartib is an easy to use time tracking tool for the command line. It saves a log of all tracked activities as a plaintext file and allows you to create flexible reports.
Alice is not chasing white rabbits any more. She has a real job now with real clients and project managers. Therefore, she has to keep track of how she uses the hours of her working day. See how Alice uses Bartib for this and learn how you can use it, too.
At 8:00 a.m. Alice arrives at the office. She got an email from her project manager who asks her to start working right away on Urgent Task X from Important Project A. So Alice types at the command line:
console
alice@work: ~ $ bartib start -d "Urgent Task X" -p "Important Project"
And Bartib confirms:
Started activity: "Urgent Task X" (Important Project) at 2021-10-29 08:00
At 8:43 one of her colleagues drops by and they decide to have a coffee. As she cannot bill this time to her customers, Alice stops the running activity in Bartib:
console
alice@work: ~ $ bartib stop
Stopped activity: "Urgent Task X" (Important Project) started at 2021-10-29 08:00 (43m)
Almost 10 minutes later she is back at her desk and continues work:
console
alice@work: ~ $ bartib continue
Started activity: "Urgent Task X" (Important Project) at 2021-10-29 08:51
At 10:13 another email arrives: Urgent Task X has to wait! Now More Urgent Task Y from Just Another Project B has to be carried out immediately.
Alice types:
console
alice@work: ~ $ bartib start -d "More Urgent Task Y" -p "Just Another Project B"
Stopped activity: "Urgent Task X" (Important Project) started at 2021-10-29 09:01 (1h 12m)
Started activity: "More Urgent Task Y" (Just Another Project B) at 2021-10-29 10:13
See how Bartib just stops the running activity when another one starts? No need to stop it manually.
It is a productive morning. After More Urgent Task Y Alice workes on other projects and other tasks, but now it is time for lunch and Alice lets Bartib list all the activities she has tracked today until now:
```console alice@work: ~ $ bartib list --today
Started Stopped Description Project Duration
08:00 08:43 Urgent Task X Important Project 43m
08:51 10:13 Urgent Task X Important Project 1h 22m
10:13 10:35 More Urgent Task Y Just Another Project B 22m
10:35 10:53 Urgent Task X Important Project 18m
10:53 11:45 Simple Task Z Less Important Project 52m
11:45 12:34 Boring Task XY Internal Project C 49m
```
After her lunch break Alice wants to continue work on More Urgent Task Y. Instead of typing the task description and the project name again, she asks Bartib for a list of all the tasks she has recently worked on:
```console alice@work: ~ $ bartib last
# Description Project
[3] More Urgent Task Y Just Another Project B
[2] Urgent Task X Important Project
[1] Simple Task Z Less Important Project
[0] Boring Task XY Internal Project C
```
And she instructs Bartib to continue task #3:
console
alice@work: ~ $ bartib continue 3
Started activity: "More Urgent Task Y" (Just Another Project B) at 2021-10-29 12:52
An exciting day at work continues. As it is a Friday Alice decides to already leave work at shortly after seven. She stops her latest activity and asks Bartib for a report:
```console alice@work: ~ $ bartib report --today
Important Project................................. 2h 43m Another Task xyz.............................. 15m Important Call with the Client................ 35m Urgent Task X................................. 1h 53m
Internal Project C................................ 4h 30m Another Meeting............................... 45m Boring Task XY................................ 1h 15m Long Meeting with Everyone from the Department 2h 30m
Just Another Project B............................ 45m More Urgent Task Y............................ 45m
Less Important Project............................ 2h 27m Simple Task No. 5............................. 1h 35m Simple Task Z................................. 52m
Total............................................. 10h 25m ```
Alice is happy. This was just another great day at the company and thanks to Bartib tracking her time was a breeze.
Do you want to be as happy as Alice? Use Bartib!
Simply download a suitable executable from https://github.com/nikolassv/bartib/releases and copy it in some directory that is listed in your PATH (e.g. ~/bin).
Bartib is written in rust. You may build it yourself with the help of cargo. Just clone this repository and execute the cargo build command in its main directory:
bash
cargo build --release
You may either specify the path to your log as an extra parameter (--file or -f) to your bartib command:
bash
bartib -f ~/activities.bartib report
Or you may set the environment variable BARTIB_FILE to the path of your log. Just add this line to your .profile file:
bash
export BARTIB_FILE="~/activities.bartib"
If the specified log file does not exist yet Bartib creates it.
Just open your activitiy log in your favorite text editor to edit or delete former activities. You may even add new activities manually in this file. The format is self explanatory.
Bartib even offers the bartib edit command which opens the log in the editor defined by your EDITOR environment variable. If you are unsure whether your edits are readable by bartib, use the bartib check command. It will inform you about any parsing errors.
Bartib offers a simple auto completion for project names. This saves you from typing out long project names each time you start a new task. Just source the script misc/bartibCompletion.sh in your .bashrc to enable it.
All these commands require that you have set the BARTIB_FILE environment variable to the file path of your activity log. Otherwise they require an additional -f/--file parameter between bartib and the subcommand (see above: How to define in which file to save the log of your activities).
bash
bartib -h # get help
bartib start -p "name of the project" -d "description of the activity" # start a new activity
bartib stop # stop an activity
bartib list --today # list all activities of the current day
bartib report --today # create a report for today
bash
bartib -h # Print a concise help
bartib start -h # Print a help for any subcommand
```bash bartib start -p "The name of the associated project" -d "A description of the activity" # Start a new activity with a short description and an associated project bartib start -p "The name of the associated project" -d "A description of the activity" -t 13:45 # Start a new activity at a given time
bartib stop # Stop the currently running activity bartib stop -t 14:00 # Stop the currently running activity at a given time
bartib last # Print a list of the ten most recently used projects and descriptions bartib last -n 25 # Prints a list of recently used projects and descriptions with more entries
bartib lastbartib continue 5 # Start an activity with a recently used project and description bartib continue # Continue the latest activity bartib continue 3 -d "Another description" # Continue activity number 3 but overwrite the description bartib continue 7 -t 8:15 # Continue activity number 7 but have it started at a given time
bartib cancel # Cancels a running activity by deleting its entry in the activity log ```
```bash bartib report # create a report of how much time has been spent on which projects and activities bartib report --today # create a report for today bartib report --yesterday # create a report for yesterday bartib report --date 2021-09-03 # create a report for a given day bartib report --from 2021-09-01 --to 2021-09-05 # create a report for a given time range bartib report --project "The most exciting project" # create a report for a given project
bartib list # list all activities grouped by day bartib list --no_grouping # list all activities but do not group them by day
bartib list --today # list todays' activites bartib list --yesterday # list yesterdays' activities bartib list --from 2021-09-01 --to 2021-09-05 # list activities in a given time range bartib list --date 2021-09-03 # list activities on a given day bartib list --project "The most exciting project" # list activities for a given project ```
```bash bartib current # show currently running activity bartib projects # list all projects ever used
bartib edit # open the activity log in the editor you have defined in your EDITOR environment variable
bartib edit -e vim # open the activity log in a given editor
bartib check # check your activity log for invalid lines ```