Simple Stopwatch

The simplest use of Timewarrior is as a stopwatch, to record an activity. As you begin the activity, you start the clock:

$ timew start
Tracking
  Started 2016-06-14T08:18:23
  Current                  23
  Total               0:00:00

The word ‘Tracking’ is used to indicate active tracking. You are shown the start date/time, the current time compared to the start time, and the total elapsed time, which is currently none. As the clock is running, you can see the current elapsed time by simply running Timewarrior with no arguments:

$ timew
Tracking
  Started 2016-06-14T08:18:23
  Current               20:20
  Total               0:01:57

Later when the activity ends, you stop the clock:

$ timew stop
Recorded
  Started 2016-06-14T08:18:23
  Ended                 20:49
  Total               0:02:26

The word ‘Recorded’ is used to indicate that an activity has ended, and the time recorded. Now if you run Timewarrior with no arguments, it will not report any tracking:

$ timew
There is no active time tracking.

When you want to seamlessly switch to another activity, you can invoke the start command while there still is an activity being tracked:

$ timew
Tracking "Write documentation"
  Started 2016-07-03T22:12:28
  Current               42:48
  Total               0:30:20

$ timew start "Proofread documentation"
Recorded "Write documentation"
  Started 2016-07-03T22:12:28
  Ended                 44:26
  Total               0:31:58
Tracking "Proofread documentation"
  Started 2016-07-03T22:44:26
  Current                  26
  Total               0:00:00

As you can see, the previously running activity has ended at the current time/date, while the new activity has started with an open interval at the same time.

To see a summary of today’s recorded time, use the summary command:

$ timew summary

Wk  Date       Day Tags   Start     End    Time   Total
--- ---------- --- ---- ------- ------- ------- -------
W25 2016-06-14 Tue      8:18:23 8:20:49 0:02:26 0:02:26
                                                -------
                                                0:02:26

By default, the summary command shows only today’s tracked time. You can learn more about the ѕummary command in other documents.