I’m self employed. I need to record how much time I spend on whatever task for whatever client.

Sounds simple, but I’m terrible at it. I always get to the end of the day without having recorded anything and not knowing what I’ve actually done.

Basically, I’d like to create a text log of the active window title, and take a screen cap.

I’d like to do this periodically as in every 15 minutes or so.

For the text log I just haven’t been able to achieve this at all.

For the screen caps I can use flameshot to take a screenshot from the CLI, but it makes a sound and shows an animation which is sub-optimal.

Any suggestions of where to look much appreciated.

Edit: I’m not asking for a time tracking app. I want something to log the active window title and take a screen cap so I can figure out what I was doing and write it in my time tracking app.

Edit: I’m narrowing in on a solution.

Firstly, a lot of previously available solutions don’t work because of recently implemented security features in gnome.

You need to enter unsafe mode by entering this:

global.context.unsafe_mode = true

in the looking glass tool which you can access by running lg in the alt + f2 dialog

thereafter, this can grab the active window title for you:

gdbus call --session --dest org.gnome.Shell --object-path /org/gnome/Shell --method org.gnome.Shell.Eval "global.display.focus_window.title"
  • nortio@feddit.it
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    1 day ago

    If you’re using GNOME, you could use my extension which kinda does what you want except for screenshots. Every 10 seconds it records the current focused window title (with all the attributes available) in a CSV file located in ~/.local/share/activitytracket/log. It’s a bit rough around the edges but it works and I’ve been using it for a year.

    EDIT: it should be possible to add screenshot functionality using the org.gnome.Shell.Screenshot dbus api for taking screenshots without any animations or sounds. It should not be that difficult to add to my extension