Hamster - The Gnome Time Tracker

Hamster is time tracking for individuals. It helps you to keep track of how much time you have spent during the day on activities you choose to track.

The rewrite of hamster is progressing well, but it is still listed as alpha.

This is the legacy repo that still use the same old hamster.db, but migrated to Gtk3 and python3, and without python-gconf dependency. This allowed to use hamster on platforms (such as openSUSE Leap-15) where 1.04-based versions were completely broken.

With respect to 1.04, some of the gui ease of use has been lost, especially for tags handling, and the stats display is minimal now. So if you are happy with your hamster application, upgrade is not recommended yet.

But at least backward compatibility seems good. It sounds usable enough to wait for the rewrite.

After a little tweaking, it works now, but has not been thoroughly tested. Backup hamster.db first, and keep track of activities on a text file too for some days !

Installation

You can use the usually stable master or download stable releases.

If you upgraded from an existing installation make sure to kill the running daemons:

pkill -f hamster-service
pkill -f hamster-windows-service
# check (should be empty)
pgrep -af hamster

Dependencies

Debian-based

ubuntu (tested in 19.04 and 18.04):

sudo apt install gettext intltool gconf2 gir1.2-gconf-2.0 python3-gi-cairo
sudo apt install gnome-doc-utils yelp

openSUSE

Leap-15.0 and Leap-15.1:

sudo zypper install intltool python3-pyxdg python3-cairo python3-gobject-Gdk
sudo zypper install gnome-doc-utils xml2po yelp

RPM-based

RPM-based instructions below should be updated for python3 (issue #369).

yum install gettext intltool gnome-python2-gconf dbus-python

If the hamster help pages are not accessible ("unable to open help:hamster-time-tracker"), then a Mallard-capable help reader is required, such as yelp.

Trying the development version

To use the development version (backup hamster.db first !):

# either
pgrep -af hamster
# and kill them one by one
# or be bold and kill all process with "hamster" in their command line
pkill -ef hamster
src/hamster-service &
src/hamster-windows-service &
src/hamster-cli

Building and installing

./waf configure build
# thanks to the parentheses the umask of your shell will not be changed
( umask 0022 && sudo ./waf install; )

The umask 0022 is safe for all, but important for users with more restrictive umask, as discussed here.

Now restart your panels/docks and you should be able to add Hamster!

Uninstall

./waf configure
sudo ./waf uninstall

Migrating from hamster-applet

Previously Hamster was installed everywhere under hamster-applet. As the applet is long gone, the paths and file names have changed to hamster-time-tracker. To clean up previous installs follow these steps:

git checkout d140d45f105d4ca07d4e33bcec1fae30143959fe
./waf configure build --prefix=/usr
sudo ./waf uninstall

Contributing

IMPORTANT Project Hamster is undergoing a period of major transition. The main effort should go to the rewrite (repositories: hamster-lib/dbus/cli/gtk). hamster-gtk is a good starting point.

The legacy code is hard to maintain, so changes should be minimal and straightforward to have a chance of being accepted.

1. Fork this project
2. Create a topic branch - git checkout -b my_branch
3. Push to your branch - git push origin my_branch
4. Submit a Pull Request with your branch
5. That's it!