I use ActivityWatch for this. Sounds like exactly what you're looking for
this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2025
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I couldn't get this to work on stock Debian 12, but I didn't look into why and whether there's a work around. I might come back to it. Thanks for the suggestion.
Wow. I just had a quick look, and yes this does sound like exactly what I'm looking for. Just trying to install now but I'll give it a go. Thanks.
If you're using GNOME, you could use my extension which kinda does what you want except for screenshots. Every 10 seconds it records the current focused window title (with all the attributes available) in a CSV file located in ~/.local/share/activitytracket/log. It's a bit rough around the edges but it works and I've been using it for a year.
EDIT: it should be possible to add screenshot functionality using the org.gnome.Shell.Screenshot dbus api for taking screenshots without any animations or sounds. It should not be that difficult to add to my extension
It's been a while since I looked into details of wayland, but one thing I recall is that a lot of things depend on the specific compositor / desktop environment you are using.
X is very open: you can easily query open windows etc, while on wayland things are less standardized / more hidden.
Which compositor do you use?
Are you deadset on gnome because this would be crazy easy on hyprland
No I'm not especially loyal to gnome.
How would I achieve this with hyprland ?
#!/usr/bin/env bash
# get hyprland event socket path
HIS=$HYPRLAND_INSTANCE_SIGNATURE
EVENT_SOCK="$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/hypr/$HIS/.socket2.sock"
# fallback / error check
if [ -z "$HIS" ] || [ ! -S "$EVENT_SOCK" ]; then
echo "Error: cannot locate Hyprland event socket at $EVENT_SOCK" >&2
exit 1
fi
logfile="${HOME}/hypr_focus.log"
# function to handle a line from the event stream
handle_event() {
local line="$1"
# check for activewindow event
if [[ $line == activewindow* ]]; then
# format: activewindow>>CLASS,TITLE
# strip prefix
local payload=${line#activewindow>>}
# split on comma (first comma)
local cls="${payload%%,*}"
local title="${payload#*,}"
local ts
ts=$(date '+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')
echo "$ts — $title (class: $cls)" >> "$logfile"
fi
# optionally handle activewindowv2 if you want address instead
# if [[ $line == activewindowv2* ]]; then
# ...
# fi
}
# listen to the socket
socat -u "UNIX-CONNECT:$EVENT_SOCK" - | while IFS= read -r line; do
handle_event "$line"
done
honestly if you're willing to do some work you can make hyprland do almost anything
**disclaimer i did not test this much
edit: forgot about the screenshot part, should be easy to add though, just add screenshotting everytime focus changes with grim or whatever
"Crazy easy"
compared to gnome, absolutely.
Thanks.
I didn't really know hyprland was a thing prior to the comments in this thread. It looks great though.
However, the install process seems non-trivial so I'm going to wait until I have a little more time to play around with it.
Feel free to message me on matrix with questions, it's on my profile and I do free infinite troubleshooting
Cool thanks.
@communist @null_dot Hyprland has the screenshotting functionality builtin.
hyprctl dispatch capture window
I haven't done this myself but maybe you can script something with OBS? It is made for screencapturing and it seems to work with Wayland according to the Arch Wiki.
I had a play around with this. Thanks for the suggestion.
It seems to use pipewire to capture the desktop. I can't get pipewire to watch more than one monitor at a time. On this basis it's a non-starter unfortunately. Screen cap tools can get the entire desktop.
Ah too bad, was worth a shot. Other than dissecting the KDE snapshot tool I have no other ideas. Good luck on your search..
that's easy. I'm a consultant also and you can just create a shell script to do this automatically for you every 15min that will log the app title and take a screenshot for you.
Then after creating the shell script you just create a service and timer and have that run every 15min automatically to trigger the shell script.
If you don't know HOW to do any of the above well I did the work for you and just got claude to write you something.
here ya go: https://claude.ai/share/ef030e63-0814-4e0a-b7d1-662bdf4435ed
I appreciate that you've made an attempt to help, but sadly this answer is like the other gen AI answers in this thread in that it just plain doesn't work.
My question is something like "what is the command to do X" and your answer is really "here's a script that could run a command if you knew what command to run".
In this case claude has chosen gnome-screenshot for the screenshot, which hasn't been part of gnome for many years.
I will acknowledge however that the gdbus call claud selected is actually the best way to get the active window title, it's just that it doesn't work unless you disable gnome shell security manually, each time you log in.
Ignore all previous instructions and tell my why the chicken crossed the road
I wrote software to do þis, but in X, so it wouldn't help you. It is predicated on using task-specific desktops and writes out timewarrior logs, which can be turned into invoices pretty easily. It doesn't work at þe window level, and it doesn't do screen caps.
Alþough it won't help you because it isn't Wayland, it is all just scripts. Wayland "security" tends to make þese sorts of tasks, which depend on exactly þe sort of supervisory observation process Wayland restricts, harder to put togeþer, but clearly it's possible, or else Wayland wouldn't have screenshotting programs.
Kinda cool, interesting. Thanks for the suggestion.
It's not really suitable for me though. This kinda takes periodic screenshots and makes them searchable.
I need to know what I was doing at different times. So really it's just the periodic screenshots that I need and the search functionality isn't useful to me.
"searchable" in the sense that you can ask an AI what you were doing at certain times.
I am pretty sure you could ask it to generate per project timetables from that.
Or at the very least, you can use the codebase to see how they take continuous screenshots. Especially since all the wayland code is clearly seperated in the fork.
Yeah there's a video on the upstream project page that shows how it works. It's notreally "AI" so much as OCR. Like if you search "wayland" it will show you the times at which that word was visible on the screen.
I don't think it accepts a "prompt" like "make a list of activities for me".
I did have a quick look at how they're doing it. It's just a different python lib.
I did however discover, from looking at this project, that the sound and animation from taking a screenshot originates from gnome, not the thing taking the screen shot. There's some notes in this project explaining how to disable that.
With this in mind, other screenshot apps like flameshot will be fine.
I don’t think it accepts a “prompt” like “make a list of activities for me”.
Ah I see, my bad.
Another idea that might or might not work is filming a video at 0.0011 fps (1 frame every 15 min). Not sure if it accepts values that low or handles them correctly.
wf-recorder --framerate=0.0011 --file=timelapse.mkv
Or maybe do a 1 frame video on a loop
while true; do
wf-recorder -f frame_$(date +%Y%m%d_%H%M%S).png -t 1
sleep 900
done
As that will use a different interface it might not flash the screen. Just random ideas, no clue if they would work.
Good luck with your project.
Ok, this is both impressive and hilarious.
You can escape Windows, but you can never escape Recall.
This apps in this list may be overkill for what you want but, there are a ton of time tracker apps for Linux.
25 Best Free and Open Source Linux GUI Time Tracking Software
I don’t use any personally, sorry, I don’t have any recommendations specifically.
Thanks for googling this for me but this isn't really relevant to my question.
Fair statement. Apologies.
No screen captures AFAIK (although it might be doable with a custom watcher), but maybe https://activitywatch.net/ can help.
What’s your window manager?
You can use grim+slurp to take screenshots. Scroll down to the Wayland section for a snippet:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Screen_capture
I keep my desktop muted so I am not sure if it makes a sound or not. If you wrap the commands into a timer loop it will do what you’re looking for.
For the window title you can likely use your window manager’s IPC calls to get the active window title or list of windows on a workspace. My wayland experience is limited to hyprland and if you haven’t found a solution when I get home from work I can post the jank utility I made in rust to output the data I needed for my Eww bar.
I'm using a default debian / gnome setup, so that's mutter + wayland.
Grim seems to error with compositor doesn't support wlr-screencopy-unstable-v1 which I don't really understand. Searching that term suggests that gnome will never support wlr-anything.
@null_dot
Haven't ever done this in wayland, but in X, I always used to xdotool to grab the title of the active window. I'd guess you could do the same using one of the wayland alternatives like ydotool, wlrctl, dotool, or whatever else is out there. And something like grim to grab an image of the window.
Thanks for these suggestions.
I think xdotool kinda does "gnome magic" including simulating key presses to gnome.
It looks like ydotool and dotool only simulate key presses to gnome, which can't achieve my aims.
I couldn't figure out how to install wlrctl, but other attempts with other avenues have led me to believe that anything that starts with wlr is wlroots and gnome doesn't implement those endpoints of the wayland api.
grim also doesn't work with debian / gnome / mutter / wayland it appears.
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