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Awatcher

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Awatcher is a window activity and idle watcher with an optional tray and UI for statistics. The goal is to compensate the fragmentation of desktop environments on Linux by supporting all reportable environments, to add more flexibility to reports with filters, and to have better UX with the distribution by a single executable.

The foundation is ActivityWatch, which includes the provided server and web UI. The unbundled watcher is supposed to replace the original idle and active window watchers from the original distribution. The bundled executable can be used independently as it contains the server, UI and tray.

The binaries for the bundle, bundled DEB and ActivityWatch watchers replacement can be downloaded from releases.

Module for ActivityWatch

  • Run sudo unzip aw-awatcher.zip -d /usr/local/bin in the console to allow ActivityWatch to detect its presence.
    • Or install the provided aw-awatcher_*.deb.
  • Remove aw-watcher-window and aw-watcher-afk from autostart at aw-qt/aw-qt.toml in config directory, add aw-awatcher.
  • Restart ActivityWatch. In the Modules submenu there should be a new checked module aw-awatcher. Note that awatcher shows up in the Web UI under Timeline as aw-watcher-window_$HOSTNAME.
  • Optionally, you can use systemd instead of ActivityWatch runner. In this case, skip adding aw-awatcher to aw-qt.toml and install this service configuration. In this case, ActivityWatch server also must be managed by systemd (as aw-server.service in the config).

Bundle with built-in ActivityWatch

This is a single binary to run awatcher with the server without changing system and ActivityWatch configuration. The bundle is aw-server-rust and awatcher as a single executable. The data storage is compatible with ActivityWatch and aw-server-rust (aw-server has a different storage), so this can later be run as a module for ActivityWatch.

External modules are run like in the original ActivityWatch distribution by looking at $PATH and running all executables whose name starts with aw-. They are controled from the tray, no additional configuration is necessary.

Autostart

It is recommended to use ~/.config/autostart for the bundle. This folder is employed by "Autostart" in KDE settings and Gnome Tweaks. Systemd may require to sleep for a few seconds (ExecStartPre=/bin/sleep 5) in order to wait for the environment. See this service configuration.

Supported environments

ActivityWatch server should be run before awatcher is running. At this moment only Linux is supported. The watcher type is selected automatically as soon as the environment has the necessary interfaces.

Environment Active window Idle
X11 🟢 🟢
Sway, Hyprland 🟢 1 🟢 2
Wayland + KDE 🟡 3 🟢
Wayland + Gnome 🟡 4 🟢

Important

Gnome watcher in Wayland requires this extension to be installed. Also, if you have problems with tray icons in Gnome, you may try this extension for the bundle (StatusNotifierItem specification).

Configuration

The config file is in the default directory (~/.config/awatcher).

[server]
port = 5600
host = "127.0.0.1"

[awatcher]
idle-timeout-seconds=180
poll-time-idle-seconds=4
poll-time-window-seconds=1

[[awatcher.filters]]
# match only "navigator"
match-app-id = "navigator"
# match any title which contains "Secret" or "secret" 
match-title = ".*[sS]ecret.*"
replace-app-id = "firefox"
replace-title = "Unknown"
  • server.port and server.host address the ActivityWatch server instance.
  • awatcher.idle-timeout-seconds is the time of inactivity when it is considered "idle".
  • awatcher.poll-time-idle-seconds and awatcher.poll-time-window-seconds are intervals between collecting and sending statistics.

All options of server and awatcher config file's sections can be overridden with command-line arguments, as well as the config path. See the builtin help in the command for details.

Filters

awatcher.filters in the config file is an array of filters and replacements for the cases when the application name or title should be hidden, or the app is reported incorrectly. Copy the section as many times as needed for every given filter.

  • match-app-id matches the application name.
  • match-title matches the title name.
  • replace-app-id replaces the application name with the provided value.
  • replace-title replaces the window title with the provided value.

The first matching filter stops the replacement. There should be at least 1 match field for a filter to be valid. If the replacement is not specified, the data is not reported when matched. Matches are case sensitive regular expressions between implicit ^ and $:

  • . matches 1 any character
  • .* matches any number of any characters
  • .+ matches 1 or more any characters.
  • word is an exact match.
  • Use escapes \ to match special characters, e.g. org\.kde\.Dolphin

Captures

The replacements in filters also support regexp captures. A capture takes a string in parentheses from the match and replaces $N in the replacement. Example to remove the changed file indicator in Visual Studio Code:

  • Before: "● file_config.rs - awatcher - Visual Studio Code"
  • After: "file_config.rs - awatcher - Visual Studio Code"
[[awatcher.filters]]
match-app-id = "code"
match-title = "● (.*)"
# Inserts the content within 1st parentheses, this can be in any form, e.g. "App $1 - $2/$3"
replace-title = "$1"

Debugging app-id and title

Run the command with "debug" or "trace" verbosity and without reporting to server in the terminal to see what application names and titles are reported to the server.

$ awatcher -vvv --no-server

Build

Prerequisites

Names of packages are from Ubuntu, other distributions may have different names.

  • Rust stable or nightly (for the bundle) toolchain
  • pkg-config
  • libssl-dev
  • libdbus-1-dev (for the bundled version)
  • build-essential

Compile

  • cargo build --release in the root of the repository.
  • The target file will be located at target/release/awatcher.

Add --no-default-features to the build command if you want to opt out of the Gnome and KDE support, add --features=? ("gnome" or "kwin_window") on top of that if you want to enable just one.

To track your activities in browsers install the plugin for your browser from here (Firefox, Chrome etc).

Compile with bundle

The executable can be bundled with a tray icon, ActivityWatch server and, optionally, Web UI (if steps 1-2 are done):

  1. Clone and follow the instruction in ActivityWatch/aw-webui@839366e to build the "dist" folder,
  2. Build the executable with AW_WEBUI_DIR=/absolute/path/to/dist and --features=bundle.

This should be compiled on nightly. The complete bundled version is also built and released.

The tray can be disabled with --no-tray option in the bundled version.

Footnotes

  1. A few other DEs besides Sway may implement wlr foreign toplevel protocol, ↩

  2. KWin idle and Idle notify protocols are supported. ↩

  3. KWin doesn't implement any toplevel protocol yet, KWin script is utilized instead (builtin, no actions required). KDE partially supports XWayland, but inconsistently, hence X11 is not utilized for it. ↩

  4. Gnome doesn't implement any toplevel protocol yet, so this extension should be installed. ↩