treetonin and scriptextual

As announced in the last post, I published treetonin as a replacement for Jreepad. During the last few weeks most of the time I was taking notes, it were just time tracking notes. I tried several time tracking tools over the years and I think time tracking, as it is somewhat of a meta task, has to be totally painless or people are not gonna use it at all. Well, unless they are forced to, of course.

For that purpose, Jreepad provides a helpful little function that inserts the current date at the cursor position. After the date I list the periods of actual work time during that day. When I start working, I write down the time. When I stop working, I write a minus sign and then the current time. So an entry for one workday looks like that.

2009-02-27
0545-0640
0700-1430
1520-2240

At the end of each day I usually calculate the worktime sum and put it in parentheses after the date mark. That’s some pretty basic and constrained text manipulation, right? It screams for automation. So with treetonin I switched from taking notes in a desktop app to taking notes in the browser, more precisely, in a textarea. What’s missing is a way to easily manipulate the value of this textarea to provide some helpers.

What a funny coincidence that I published another little project called scriptextual a few weeks earlier. I added this to treetonin as a submodule and I will added the following functions during the next days and weeks.

• insert line with current date; beginning of a new workday
• insert line with current time; beginning of a task
• append minus sign and current time to last line; end of a task
• add sum of timespans in parentheses after the last date mark