wat

wat is a TUI interface for Watson

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Overview and screenshots

Main Interface

Wat's main screen consists of 3 groupings of tasks, each of which is optional and can be disabled via settings. The idea here is to provide an interface to toggle what task you are currently working on, with lots of options for editing, annotating, and reporting on that time spent later. When you track time on a task, it will show up in the view page (v), which is analogous to watson log.

The three available categories of task are Permanent Items, for tasks that will likely be part of your workflow for the forseeable future, Recurring Items for scheduled weekly meetings or tasks which come and go, and Ad-Hoc Items for things that will not recur. Eventually, I plan to make the Ad-Hoc section display items in reverse order, and remove ones beyond 10 items. This will not delete past time entries for those items.

The 'View Entries' Interface

Pressing v on the main interface will take the user to the interface for viewing actual time entries, as created from the main interface. The default view is the 'day' view, which shows your entries for the current day. You can press p to group or ungroup your tasks by project. You can also navigate using h,j,k,l between entries, entries grouped by project, grouped by day, or all entries. You can press g to go to the top entry or G to go to the bottom entry. You can press y to copy the selection to your clipboard.

Weekly and Monthly View

When in the view interface, you can switch to a weekly or monthly view using w or m. Grouping works the same way in these views as in the daily view (use p to toggle grouping). You can also press 'r' to reverse the order of the days in the display.

Individual entry editing

When an entry is selected, you can press e to edit the full watson edit configuration for your selected entry in your chosen $EDITOR

Backfill gap and overlap correction

The ungrouped view can also be used as an error resolution and quick edit page using the b (backfill) key. Here, backfill roughly translates to 'take the current entry and make its start time equal to the stop time of the previous entry'. The b key will do nothing if the entry is the first entry of the day.

In the ungrouped view, entries are chronological. Entries with gaps betweent them are denoted by a blank line with three dashes (---). Entries which overlap with the previous entry (which is likely an error and should never happen) are colored yellow. In both cases, pressing b will resolve the issue. (You may want gaps in certain cases such as lunch breaks or short breaks, so don't do this without thinking about the context)

Rounding

The time tracking software I use at work only accepts logging for tasks and projects in 15m intervals, so I included a hotkey R to automatically round tasks to the nearest 15m. This reduces a little burden when reporting time, but keep in mind that if you get unlucky and many entries are rounded down you may end up under-reporting. Keep this in mind and always sanity check your time.

Annotation

Watson actually doesn't include any options for annotating time entries by default! However, it does allow you to technically assign multiple 'tags' to an entry. In wat, we've been treating the tag as the name of the time entry more-or-less. When an entry is completed, you can navigate to the view page and press a to add a second tag if you want to be more specific about that particular entry. In practice, it looks just fine in the final reporting.

Building & Running

cargo build
cargo run

Requires watson on your PATH with a configured workspace. The application will automatically create the necessary ~/.config/watson directory structure on first run if it doesn't exist.

Otherwise, just download the latest release for a relatively-stable binary.

Keybindings (Summary)

Keys	Action
j / k, arrows	Move selection
Enter	Start/stop timer
n	New entry (project + optional tag)
p	Reassign project for selected item
v	View Watson log (d/w/m period, p group, g/G nav, e edit, x delete, y copy)
x	Delete entry
Ctrl+e	Edit task config (state.yaml)
c	Edit app config (config.yaml) or show config help
?	Help screen
q	Quit

TODO

Architecture

Eventually I need to refactor this whole thing, which was mostly written by LLMs. I want to make the underlying data structure for the view display much more solidly defined so that it is more extensible. It should be stored in some kind of nested structure which is aware of ordering as well as grouping and can be dynamically (and optimistically) updated without refreshing the UI when appropriate. Once that is resolved, I can focus on the following upgrades:

• Adding a / command to narrow down entries by fuzzy searching
• Perhaps having a universal interface for entries going back more than a month
• An option for people who don't want to copy / paste their hours into another interface
• Actually ordering the ad-hoc section by most recently used one-offs, and implementing a good way to auto-prune that list
• Print the time totals at the project-level for each day
• Some kind of API for the real weirdos out there (sean)

Terminal interface

Another big reason I need to drill down and rewrite this with human hands is the difference between the mac and linux terminal handling. I need to learn to use ratatui well enough to understand how to develop for both platforms at once. I originally coded this on a linux machine, and I had a much smoother experience which was largely broken on Mac. This lead to a lot of spaghettification supporting mac, and some of the things I had working on linux are still not working on mac.