get-up-timer

A simple daemon that monitors your keyboard and mouse activity and reminds you to take breaks.

Motivation

I often lose track of time and forget to take breaks, so I spent way too much time writing this daemon to keep track of my activity and remind me when its time to take a break! (:

Instead of checking for activity indirectly I decided to just use the /dev/input/by-id interface to measure activity directly. This daemon can identify mouse and keyboard devices so it should be compatible anywhere (at least on Linux).

What it does

The daemon tracks your input device activity and cycles through three states:

• Active - you're actively using your computer
• Idle - you haven't touched anything for 5 minutes
• Alert - you've been active for 1 hour without a break (time to get up!)

It writes the current state to /tmp/user_state as JSON, so you can display it in your status bar (something like Waybar).

Setup

Just run the standard cargo build command:

cargo build --release

You'll find the binary at target/release/get-up-timer

Since the daemon needs root access to read from /dev/input/by-id/, you'll want to run it as a system service.

Create /etc/systemd/system/get-up-timer.service:

[Unit]
Description=Get Up Timer
After=multi-user.target

[Service]
ExecStart=/path/to/get-up-timer
# For testing with debug mode:
# ExecStart=/path/to/get-up-timer --debug
Restart=on-failure

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Then enable and start it:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable get-up-timer
sudo systemctl start get-up-timer

You can check if it's running with:

sudo systemctl status get-up-timer

Waybar integration

If you're using Waybar, just add this to your config:

"custom/get-up-timer": {
    "exec": "cat /tmp/user_state",
    "return-type": "json",
    "interval": 1
}

Configuration

Right now the timing values are hardcoded in src/main.rs:

• Alert after 1 hour of activity
• Break duration: 5 minutes
• Idle timeout: 5 minutes

You can edit these and recompile if you want different timings!

Output format

The state file is just JSON with Pango markup for pretty colors:

{
  "text": "<span foreground='#a6e3a1'> ● </span>",
  "tooltip": "Active: 00:15:42"
}

The different states look like this:

• Active: green dot
• Idle: yellow dot
• Alert: orange "GET UP" text (hard to miss!)