Great concept, but I'm not sure how comfortable I would be with a plugin that sends a list of active files to a website (even if it is SSL-secured).

How is this different from http://rescuetime.com (other than only tracking the text editor)?

Good question. WakaTi.me knows what project your working under while rescuetime.com only knows that your inside your text editor.

That makes sense.

RescueTime gives me information about how much time I spent in each file and is showing me the project as part of that info, but it doesn't rollup time spent in a project.

Still seems of limited use since it wouldn't show me time spent debugging in a browser, working in the database, etc. From a productivity standpoint RescueTime lets me dictate that http://myproject.dev is "debugging" time, Sublime Text is "IDE" time and that Terminal is also "development" time. If I could change how Sublime Text displays info in the title bar then I could probably set it to know that "Sublime Text -> My Project -> file" was time spent in "development/my project".

Actually, RescueTime does know and report on what file / project you have open inside the text editor, as long as the info is in the window title (which both these apps do). And it's keyword-searchable by whatever is in that data point-- usually filename, project name, directory tree etc. It works this way with just about all text editors.

The key word search method is how people usually accomplish the idea of project reporting-- but is admittedly not perfect, like you could get if we actually could consume that meta data.

However, the "document" level details are only exposed to you in the premium version-- in the free version you just get an open document count, so that is a significant difference.

I've always thought the long term path for an enriched time measurement experience would involve plugins like this one. Great to see someone working on it.

Disclosure: I'm a RescueTime employee.

Or http://timingapp.com which does track what files you work on, and can be grouped into projects?

I bought timingapp and had high hopes for it, but immediately ran into various issues. First and foremost, it wouldn't let you edit the names of activities or the duration spent on any of them. You could enter a duration, but if there was a typo (like entering 12 hours instead of 12 mins), then too bad. I contacted support, but they said the features to edit...well, anything, were not currently available.

That stuff I could forgive since it's a new app, but my major issue was actually more insidious. It uses a background applescript to track your apps and your activity in each and I think it might either contain or inadvertently be causing a memory leak. I keep a memory tracker in my status bar and so I'm fairly in tune with how much memory I have on average. Within a day or two of installing the app, I noticed my memory usage going from ~50% to ~95% usage with the difference sitting in "inactive memory."

I had not changed any other major configs, started using a different set of apps, or installed any other apps since installing TimingApp, so I was very suspicious of it. Still, I gave it the benefit of the doubt and restarted my machine. I worked for another few days and my memory would just casually creep back up to ~95% and stay there until a "purge" command or another restart.

I uninstalled, restarted, and all my memory issues have since disappeared.

Just some somewhat-constructive feedback: It's always a pet peeve of mine to see the default bootstrap theme on new web apps. It doesn't take a lot of effort to customize it and doing so goes a long way to provide a sense of authority about your application.

I know it doesn't seem like that big of a deal (and for all I know, I could be alone with this sentiment) but it makes a world of difference for me.

That being said -- this looks awesome and I look forward to getting some consulting work to try it out.

Doesn't bother me in the least.

Bootstrap offers sane defaults and presents users with a familiar experience.

If my choices are color/design decisions made by someone who's specialty is something else, or just vanilla bootstrap, I'd encourage the latter.

A really cool idea, but probably not useable by anyone working on proprietary software, I'm afraid. I'd love to use it as a productivity app - particularly if you could segment the data based on the active git branch - but transmitting file information over the wire is a non starter for myself (and I imagine many others).

Have you considered maybe supporting output via some sort of graphing language instead? (R springs to mind.)

Just curious, would you have made the same arguments against RescueTime? It too transmits your activity data (and who knows what else) over the wire.

I don't know if you use(d) RescueTime or not, so I don't mean it as an attack against you. I guess I just don't remember these types of arguments being leveled against RescueTime (maybe I'm wrong about that, but a quick search didn't reveal anything) and I'm curious as to the reason. Is it b/c of the recent privacy concerns being raised by the US govt's actions, that RescueTime had more cachet when it launched, they got the messaging right to alleviate these concerns, or something else?

I actually have used RescueTime. I would have probably raised the same concern except that I was using it, at the time, at the encouragement of my employer. If they were fine with it, then so was I.

I haven't continued to use it, but to be honest I haven't given it much thought.

Tried it out, the search in file went really slow. Also, when I was away, it asked me if I wanted to log the away time. That's fine but opening up dialogs until Sublime crashes, not ok.

Will try it out more when/if those two things are fixed.

It's probably slow now because of the HN load.

Right now I don't have a better way to log AFK time besides the dialog. Just to clarify, are you worried about Sublime crashing while you're away?

Cool. I just use org-mode in Emacs which tracks all of my tasks and puts a nice little timer in my status bar. It saves everything in plain-text and I can export it to various formats such as HTML or PDF as needed. I'd take a look at it for inspiration if you're interested.

We do something pretty similar with PaymoPlus but it works with any app http://www.paymo.biz/paymoplus - not sure why you would limit the app only to text editors.

Cool idea... It took over my ST2 though. When trying to enter the API key, the console flashed wildly with a couldn't find api key message of sorts. Then, when I finally got the API key to be accepted, I was unable to access package control via ctrl+shift+p. That functionality was replaced with another cmd window that instantly closes. Not sure what the deal is with it, but I'm uninstalling for now.

How did you uninstall? If I remove it from the packages folder it just installs it again.

some portion of my project time is while in an text editor. some portion is not. and use a variety of editors and tools. so if it only captures a narrow subset of my actual spent project time, it's not a net-win for me personally. easier to start/stop a stopwatch of some kind. since that's out-of-band, it's automatically inclusive of all activities, whether an editor involved or not. reading time counts, thinking time counts, meetings, phone convos, etc.

Would a day planner view solve this? That view would show you blocks of time for the day so you could see when you started working and when you stopped working without worrying about the meetings or breaks in the middle.

How does it know if I am doing useful work? If I just leave me vim window on and leave for lunch, will it know I am idle or log the time? Also, opposite scenario, when I am concentrated on something, I basically read the code for a good 30-35 minutes, without typing anything into vim. Can it distinguish it as useful work rather than otherwise?

Cool idea,

My problem with this type of granular time applications is that they are to granular :)

I don't only work on a project when I'm typing on a text editor. I actually do a lot of thinking before using a editor in fact the actual time I spend in the editor is maybe 60% of the time I work on a project.

So for my case I will have to use it with some other time tracking tool witch is to much of a hasel.

Keep us the good work, I am sure there is a market out there for this.

Nice. I signed up for an account and installed the sublime plugin. Is there any way to export data? Even if it's just an API for now.

Do you have a bug tracker?

When I left my computer for awhile, I'm now getting infinite "You were away 17 minutes. Add time to current file?"

It's possible that it's not infinite and I just have THAT many files open, but gah. I have to uninstall this plugin for now. Let me know when it's fixed!