Whatawhat

A tool for monitoring activity on the computer throughout the day.

• Why would I want this?
• Introduction
• Installation
  • Windows
  • X11 Linux
• Usage
• Examples
• Autostart
• Notes
• Future

Why would I want this?

• Because it's hard to remember what you've been doing 3 hours ago, let alone 1 week ago.
• Because having no idea where your time goes will worsen your self-esteem.
• Because knowing how much you spend on games might help you cope with addictions.

Introducing Whatawhat

A simple cli/daemon for monitoring your activity.

No runtime required. No python, no node. The application is a single executable that takes up 1MB during execution.

Cli friendly. Very easy to use with tools like grep and less.

Everything is local. You control your data. your data does not leave your computer, not used by advertisers, not leaked by corporations.

Installation

Windows

cargo install -F win whatawhat

X11 Linux

To compile and run the application you need xcb and xscreensaver. Some distros (like Manjaro) will have them preinstalled.

To get utilities on Ubuntu you can simply run:

sudo apt-get install libxcb1-dev
sudo apt-get install xscreensaver

Then use cargo install to build the program:

cargo install -F x11 whatawhat

Usage

When you're first starting out it's recommended to run whatawhat restart. This will start the daemon for the current session.

Now you can use the whatawhat timeline to get different data about your activity.

For details on how to run the deamon on boot refer to Autostart

Examples

Get application usage for this week:

whatawhat timeline -d 1 -o days --start "last monday"

View the timeline for last 8 hours:

whatawhat timeline -d 30 -o minutes --start "8 hours ago"

Whatawhat also works well with common cli utils like grep

View when you started and ended your day with head/tail (assuming you weren't working at night):

whatawhat timeline -d 1 -o minutes --start "yesterday" --end  "yesterday" --days | tail

or

whatawhat timeline -d 1 -o minutes --start "yesterday" --end  "yesterday" --days | head

View what YouTube videos you've been watching with grep:

whatawhat timeline -d 1 -o minutes --start "today" --days | grep YouTube

Autostart

Whatawhat doesn't run startup by default. This needs to be configured yourself.

For Windows you can refer to this:

• Create a shortcut to whatawhat-daemon.exe.
• Put the shortcut into the startup folder.
• The daemon will now autostart on boot.

On Linux it's best to use autostart utilities provided by Gnome, KDE Plasma, etc.:

• Add a new process on startup.
• Specify the full path to the daemon (Usually /home/username/.cargo/bin/whatawhat-daemon).
• The daemon will now autostart on boot.

Notes

1. Dates are formatted using chrono-english. The supported formats are:

   • Relative dates: "today", "yesterday", "last monday", "1 week/day/hour/minute ago".
   • Normal dates "00:00 28/03/2025", "3pm 28/03/2025" or just "28/03/2025" (If you want to use different Us style dates add --date-style us flag).
   • Combined: "10:00 1 week ago".

2. By default whatawhat timeline will trim items which have less than 1% of the total time of usage. You can set --percentage 0% to change this.

3. If you want to go through entire days, you can use --days flag. For example if you want to get data for yesterday you can use --start "yesterday" --end "yesterday" --days. This will show data from start of "yesterday" to the end of "yesterday".

Future

• Add configuration files. Things like date formatting, collection interval should probably be modifiable. Also, defaults for whatawhat timeline should be configurable.
• Colors. Colors can be extracted from icons for applications and will make it easier to distinguish between items.
• More tests. The application lacks in integration tests and units tests for some components.