
Ask HN: Best CLI time-tracking software? - koralatov
I&#x27;m about to start some freelance work, and I&#x27;m looking for a CLI time-tracking program.  It doesn&#x27;t need to be hugely sophisticated, but ideally would have the following features:<p><pre><code>    - Relatively easy to install on Mac OS X;
    - Well-documented;
    - Store its data in plain-text;
    - Produce output that lists date, with start and finish times and 
      (even better if it can total up the time and then multiply total
       by my hourly rate);
    - Still be under active development&#x2F;maintenance.</code></pre>
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zachlatta
I embarked on this same search a few months ago. Unfortunately, I never found
something that met all of my requirements. I ended up going with Harvest
([http://www.getharvest.com/](http://www.getharvest.com/)). Harvest works
well, until you want to do something that they don't specifically account for,
or if you want complete control over your data. It does integrate invoice
creation nicely, which saves me some time.

If you find anything that matches your requirements, please let me know. I've
been thinking of writing my own.

~~~
rpwilcox
There's a Rubygem for Harvest that provides a nice CLI interface for harvest.

gem install hcl

I haven't used it in a few years, so I don't know how well it works in Ruby
1.9.x / Ruby 2.0, but it _was_ pretty nice.

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dubcanada
I made my own using a simple SQLite database with lua and Alfred. It works
very well I just type start what ever to start a task and finish to stop.

I've spent pretty much a full day trying to find a suitable solution and
besides the two listed there isn't much.

There is a stackoverflow thread with more suggestions
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/398344/best-
commandline-t...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/398344/best-commandline-
time-tracking-application)

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throwmeaway2525
I didn't end up trying it, but I thought this looked good (and appears to be
recently maintained):

[https://github.com/samg/timetrap/](https://github.com/samg/timetrap/)

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barrie57
Have a look at arbtt.
[http://darcs.nomeata.de/arbtt/doc/users_guide/](http://darcs.nomeata.de/arbtt/doc/users_guide/)

