timer
By
@torkel
- 6 Devlogs
- 7 Total hours
terminal timer application
Ship #1
Pending review
timer
a dead-simple CLI timer
why
i was tired of googling for timers all the time. for a while i’d had this thought sitting in the back of my head: why not just have a timer command in my terminal instead?
i looked around for something like this first, but couldn’t find anything in the form i actually wanted, so i built it myself.
it solves a simple problem: i needed a, terminal-native way to track time without breaking my workflow or needing a browser open in the background eating my ram.
what it is
a dead-simple timer. no fancy UI, no flags to memorize. one argument, intuitive syntax (imo):
timer 5m
that’s it.
no messing around with weird bash loops or sleep one-liners etc :D
it’s a fully working & tested on windows & linux directly, builds clean on mac via the github action too (but i dont own a mac so idk if it fully works, but it should).
QoL stuff
-
audio alarms plays a sound when the timer’s up. instead of bundling a massive audio library, it just leans on native OS tools (
PlaySoundWon Windows,afplayon macOS, and a fallback chain ofpw-play/paplay/aplayon Linux). it supports loopable or one-shot playback of a set sound, or you can just disable it entirely. -
visual alerts triggers a visual alert alongside the alarm using system tools (requires
libnotifyon linux, usesosascriptnotifications on mac, and triggers a classic message box popup on windows). -
simple config file 4 “set-and-forget” config options (
SoundPath,SendNotification,PlayAudio,LoopAudio) via a simplekey=valueformat. no need to pass crazy flags or remember syntax for a good setup;
just configure it once and runtimer 5m. -
easy peasy to use!!! i guess that counts as qol ^o^ ?
other stuff
-
simple syntax
timer 5m,timer 90s,timer 1h30m20s, whatever feels natural.
p.s the ordering of time units does not matter
- kept the scope intentionally tight: one arg in, a timer running, an alert out. no dependencies bundled in, it’s dependency-less-ish by design, leaning on existing system-level tools instead of pulling in external libraries. binary’s relatively small & fast to build because of this
- the git repo also hosts some arch linux pkgbuilds i wrote myself if ur into that kinda thing.. easy installation for nerds :)
I’m pretty happy with it and enjoy using it myself,
honestly wasn’t too hard to do since i’ve dealt with the terminal quirks i had before, which was the biggest issue
(specifically how windows handles ansii escape sequences on its old terminals)
more info exists in the readme for configuration and usage !!
windows quirks…
kinda just setting things up
- Windows VM & ANSI Support: Spent time testing in the Windows VM.
- older command prompts or PowerShell prompts on Windows require explicit setting of ANSI escape sequence support which I use so got that sorted out.. (the same way as i project i did last year actually…)
- setup Got GitHub Actions configured and put together a proper README, and also made some arch linux pkgbuilds because thats how i like installing my own applications :)
-
Audio Backends: Updated the audio player logic. Now it tries to use
pw-playif it exists, rather than strictly relying on PipeWire-Pulse or other specific layers. It supports all the audio backends for REAL now.
Audio Alerts & Config Files
changes
-
audio player, the timer can make noise now. via native OS tools instead of pulling in an audio library: PulseAudio/PipeWire/ALSA on Linux,
afplayon macOS,PlaySoundWon Windows. -
config system, added a simple
key=valueconfig format with a custom parser. nothing fancy, but it works!:D - cleanup, nothing exciting just tidying up…
p.s everything here is my own tiny (and maybe terrible) code, no imported libraries. this project’s stayed dependency-less-ish from the start, it leans on existing system-level stuff (libnotify, whatever audio server you’ve got on Linux, etc) instead of bundling in external libs :D
I have notifications working, it will trigger a terminal-bell and send a notification (depends on platform though) on windows it will use a messagebox, on linux it currently depends on libnotify, maybe not great but it’s easy to use and already super common… macos also has an implementation but i have not tested it since i am not a mac user.. you can also press ‘q’ to quit while the timer is running (on all platforms)
been fixing formatting as shown, also working on taking in input too (so pressing q quits the timer early) and im also working on getting notifications implemented
ive got the command line parser working, its a recursive descent parse which turns input (taken from argv) such as “1h30m” into milliseconds, and gets used by the timer function, suprised I got it working so quickly :) … i think im going to focus on making the output format properly to Day:Hour:Minute:Second or something, since right now its just Minutes:Seconds.. then probably figure out what to do when time runs out
i was lowk tired of having to google “x timer” every time I needed one, so I figured it would be easier to just make my own simple terminal timer app
currently i have a basic test setup i guess that just counts down and exits when done, it uses milliseconds internally but takes minutes as input
i plan to turn it into a proper CLI app with input parsing, so things like:
10s5m2h2h5m
etc. will work, then probably implement some sort of notification or something once it’s done
