several feature suggestion

[Joachim Breitner]

Dear Oren,

Am Sonntag, den 29.12.2013, 21:10 +0000 schrieb Oren Gampel:
> On Sun, 29 Dec 2013 16:25:45 +0100, Joachim Breitner wrote:
> >> 2) Workspace logging. I've seen it implemented in other time trackers,
> >> although I have no idea how difficult it is to implement it for the
> >> different environments.
> >> I'm using KDA with Plasma Desktop. I get
> >> (True,"plasma-desktop","plasma-desktop") entries but since there is no
> >> desktop number or name there is not much analysys that can be done.
> >> Using different     workspaces for different tasks is extremely common
> >> in multiple workspace/desktop environments and can add very good basis
> >> for analysing time usage.
> >> Since I only saw few (True,"plasma-desktop","plasma-desktop") and much
> >> more (False,"plasma-desktop","Plasma"), I suspect the true entry is
> >> logged only when the workspace switch is happening, although I'm not
> >> sure.
> > 
> > So the problem is that the plasma-desktop is showing up as the active
> > window? Does it then even log actual windows as active?
> > 
> > Does "wmctrl -l" print anything useful about workspaces? In particular
> > the second column?
> > 
> 
> I've used "wmctrl -l" and the result shows 11 "plasma-desktop" as window 
> titles. I have 5 desktops, each spans two screens so I guess there is 1
> +2*desktop windows. So this doesn't help, but:
> 
> "wmctrl -d" shows all the desktops, their correct names, *and* points to 
> the active one:
> 
> oren at black:~$ wmctrl -d
> 0  - DG: 2960x1050  VP: 0,0  WA: 0,0 2960x1000  Main
> 1  * DG: 2960x1050  VP: 0,0  WA: 0,0 2960x1000  Android dev
> 2  - DG: 2960x1050  VP: 0,0  WA: 0,0 2960x1000  Kids
> 3  - DG: 2960x1050  VP: 0,0  WA: 0,0 2960x1000  Project X
> 4  - DG: 2960x1050  VP: 0,0  WA: 0,0 2960x1000  Project Y
> 
> with a single asterisk marking the current desktop.(!)
> 
> I'm really hopping this can lead to implementing a desktop-related entry 
> in the log. It would be extremely helpful!

Ok, so there are two problems:
 1. Plasma desktops also appear as windows, and hence are useless to
record. This leads to the question: How to detect such windows (without
adding configuration options and preferably without hard-coding their
name). Does xprop list anything useful for them? What is their 
_NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE?
 2. Record the current desktop name (or number). "wmctrl -d" Also works
here (xmonad), highly increasing the chance of me adding that
feature :-)

> Exactly. That was what I used - adding tag Current-Title:$current.title 
> to see the list of titles, and then change the rules accordingly, and 
> than comment out the "debug" tag. A --list-titles flag for a tag would 
> save me from using this debug technique. 

Why not just leave the tag there, i.e. why do you comment it out? My
vision is that you can have one configuration file for all required
analysis, and then look at the tags that are of interest at the moment
(ignoring the others).

> While I'm at it, I would like to ask for another feature that might be 
> useful to others:
> 4) Add a --ignore-minor-breaks=Seconds [very bad flag name] to arbtt-
> stats.

This is only for the --intervals report, right?

> I admit that I'm using a 15 sec --sample-rate, which might be short, but 
> there are other things I do that actually need this granularity. On the 
> other hand, for specific tasks, I would like to ignore short breaks of a 
> minute or two. For authoring a technical paper for example, that needs 
> constant dealing with other tools, reading other articles, browsing the 
> web etc, this can be significant.

I’m not sure if this is the right approach. Ideally, you can configure
arbtt to detect that you are doing related work. Note that you can match
on other windows as well, e.g. if you are editing thesis.tex, but the
active window is your PDF viewer, you can still assign the tag
"Project:Thesis". Maybe this will close all invalid holes in the report,
leaving open the “real” holes where you read the arbtt mailing
lists :-).

Alternatively, one might be interested in something like „Intervals
where at least 90% of the time tag foo is set“, which might handle
interruptions more gracefully and faithfully than a hard timer.

But in any case such a feature needs a bit of thinking and contemplating
and brainstorming... :-)

Greetings,
Joachim
-- 
Joachim “nomeata” Breitner
  mail at joachim-breitner.de • http://www.joachim-breitner.de/
  Jabber: nomeata at joachim-breitner.de  • GPG-Key: 0x4743206C
  Debian Developer: nomeata at debian.org
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