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As I mentioned in previous post I work a lot on improving my productivity. After FreeMind it is time for arbtt. This is small tool which tracks active windows during your work. It is delivered with distro that I’m currently using (Debian wheezy). So all I had to do was:
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Below I try describe how I configure arbtt to work with some apps that I use (Google Chrome, FreeMind, gnome-terminal and screen).
To effectively work with arbtt I had to run a daemon that collects information.
In this way, I found the first problem, namely, it is hard to find a website,
which correctly explains how to execute command during startup on Debian with
GNOME environment. After few tries I realize that I should focus on GNOME
autostart mechanism. This led me to create little file in
$HOME/.config/autostart which looks like that:
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So I had configured arbtt and it starts to capture data about my work. To display this data in friendly manner arbtt-stat should be used. Application complains if $HOME/.arbtt/categorize.cfg wasn’t configured for it appropriate. Detailed documentation about this file can be found on arbtt configuration page. The process of writing this file should be iterative, starting point for me was:
- This defines some aliases, to make the reports look nicer:
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- A rule that probably everybody wants. Being inactive for over a minute causes this sample to be ignored by default.
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- Simple rule that just tags the current program
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I’d like to know what web pages in google-chrome I’m working in. So I do not tag necessarily by the active window title, but the title that contains the specific string.
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However, after creating a configuration file such statistics were displayed correctly it was still a big problem to solve - how to combine arbtt with gnome-terminal and screen. The first one requires only a correctly set the window’s name. Although the synchronization of the terminal window’s name with a window inside the screen was not a trivial task (primarily on the mass of broken tutorials that can be found on the web). Finally my .screenrc looks like that:
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set terminal title and caption keeps data about my open windows in screen.
Every time I open new window or change current one terminal title is updated. For now that’s all. In the future I wanted to write how to synchronize the title of the window in the screen with vim editor to include information about the currently edited file.
