xusing

This project is basically a quick hack using Python and X to figure out what I'm spending time on when I'm using a computer. The script repeatedly polls the name and class of the focused window in X and the idle time from the XScreenSaver extension and writes it to an auto-rotating log file.

Additionally, some configuration of tmux and zsh gives me some insight into what I'm running in a terminal, by setting the window name of the terminal window in X to indicate what I'm doing in that terminal.

I'm basically kicking the tires and seeing how useful it is, and maybe at some point in the near future I'll add some error handling and something to crunch on the log files.

Setup

Clone it, then pip install -r requirements.txt, ideally from a virtualenv. Run python src/xusing.py --help. There's no setup.py yet.

Tips for better terminal cooperation

Vim

If you use terminal Vim, consider adding the following to your .vimrc to allow Vim to set the title of the terminal window in X:

let &titlestring = expand("%:t")
if &term == "screen"
    set t_ts=^[]2;
    set t_fs=^[\\
endif
set title

(To get the ^[ character, press Ctrl-V then Esc.)

These settings configure Vim to set the Tmux pane title, rather than the window title. To set the window title instead, use set t_ts=^[k.

Tmux

Tmux can update the terminal window title automatically as panes and windows change. To do so, add the following to your .vimrc:

set -g set-titles on
set -g set-titles-string "#h:#S:#W #T"
set -g automatic-rename on

This sets the window title to include (from left to right) hostname, session name, window title, and pane title. man 1 tmux has more info on the format characters for set-titles-string.

Zsh

In your .zshrc, the preexec hook can set the tmux pane title to the command that's about to run, and the precmd hook (which runs before the prompt is displayed, effectively after a command runs) can set the tmux pane title back to a string that indicates that we're back in the shell.

preexec() {
  if [ "$(id -u)" -ne 0 ]
  then
    printf '\033]2;%s\033\\' "$1"
  fi
}

precmd() {
    printf '\033]2;%s\033\\' "zsh $PWD"
}