Extra features

Beyond the basic options, what else can the software do?

TimeSlotTracker can add custom attributes to a task or a time slot in the form of key/value pairs, so you can attach almost any type of info to a task or activity. Timewarrior has integration features with Taskwarrior, a command-line text-mode task and to-do list manager. The configuration involves some work at the command line to copy files. Once up and running, when a task is started in Taskwarrior, Timewarrior begins tracking the time spent on that task.

It also has an extension system that uses Python plugins. Searching online, we found a number of intriguing extensions. So, although Timewarrior doesn’t have billing facilities as standard, they can be added via an extension. Many of the extensions also improve the report generation facilities. The website lists 95 extensions, which are mostly well maintained. However, they involve manual installation and configuration.

As applications go, Hamster keeps things plain and simple. It does benefit from a KDE plasmoid, however, which provides an extensive front-end that fits into the KDE desktop. Arbtt’s documentation links to a couple of contributed tools that offer extra report formats. It can output as CSV for further processing and has support for R, a statistical analysis language.

We were sometimes a bit annoyed that the TimeCamp web interface presented us with a page telling us about the upgrade options to the paid version. In actual fact, the free-for-life plan has a lot of features that aren’t immediately apparent, and you can ignore the landing page and simply select features from the sidebar. In particular, we almost didn’t see some of the report and charting features that are available.