Comment by retSava | Hacker News Reader

Comment by retSava | Hacker News Reader

I use three very simple aliases for the commandline,

  alias ttag='/cygdrive/c/Dropbox/tools/ttag/ttag.sh'
  alias ttagcat='cat /cygdrive/c/Dropbox/tools/ttag/ttag-logfile.txt'
  alias ttago='open /cygdrive/c/Dropbox/tools/ttag/ttag-logfile.txt'

where `ttag.sh` is

  # specify the logfile
  LOGFILE=/cygdrive/c/Dropbox/tools/ttag/ttag-logfile.txt
  # timestamp format
  TIMESTAMP_NICE=$(date +"%F %H.%M.%S - %s:")
  # always append to the logfile
  echo $TIMESTAMP_NICE "$@" >> $LOGFILE

simple enough for me :) very simple to add a small note from the commandline, which is timestamped. Makes it easier to get a grasp of how much time I've spent on something, eg when switching between customer projects.

I have aliases very similar to yours (only differences are that they're one or two characters long, and the logs use ISO 8601 date format). Super quick to append, read, and edit personal logs - no GUI could be better or more immediate. I often grep it, but gotta admit could use an automated way to calculate time differences.

yeah, I include timestamp not only in easy human readable format, but also in epoch timestamp, so it's easier to calculate time diffs between entries.

I've always been meaning of doing something like this, but never committed to it. Do you also wrote scripts to then parse the file? Like, can you get how much did you work on a certain project of for a certain client?

Nice idea! So do you use it similar to how you'd do a git commit?

Like a personal log, and it reduces the friction to add a small entry by not having to switch to a file and write, or add the datetime. I just go about and type something like

  > ttag starting to work at frontend X for customer Y

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