SlothTracker Documentation

Keyboard shortcuts

SlothTracker is one of the few time tracking applications that supports keyboard heavy workflow. Everything that could be done with a mouse is one META+<KEY> away.

You can see the bound keys in every dialog by holding down a META key for 2 seconds. The keyboard shortcuts will appear on the screen for every possible action that you can perform on that specific dialog.

Known issues:

• MAC: holding down CMD key does not display the keyboard shortcuts, but the keyboard actions are still working fine. For displaying the shortcuts you can hold down CTRL key instead.

• MAC: a bug in the GUI framework causes the application to crash on dialog confirm action when META+ENTER is pressed. Until this bug is fixed upstream, dialogs confirm actions are triggered via Option+ENTER. The rest of keyboard actions are still handled via META+KEY keyboard shortcuts. You can check the bug report for more info.

General keyboard shortcuts (all dialogs)

Mac specifics are in parenthesis.

General table keyboard shortcuts

If the table supports the keyboard actions, the following are the common keyboard shortcuts:

Main window keyboard shortcuts

Edit task dialog shortcuts

The commonly keyboard shortcuts in edit task dialog are picked in a way that you can trigger them with the right hand only.

Other dialogs

Since there are a lot of keyboard shortcuts, they are not all listed here. In order to see what is possible, focus the dialog and hold down a META key for 2 seconds. If the dialog supports shortcuts, they will be displayed on the the dialog.

All dialogs support positive action shortcut (META+ENTER) and cancel action shortcut (ESC). For common/general keyboard shortcuts see the first table in this section.

SlothTracker 1.5.0 does not support custom shortcut/action key assignments. This feature will be added in the future.

Search

The Overview dialog supports searching for the stored tasks, either via search field or the search dialog (triggered by the button next to the search field).

Basic search

You can drill down for the specific task by using the search fields. For example:

Task title search

bugfixing, improvements

This query will search for all tasks that have a title set to “bugfixing” or “improvements. If you only want to search between the task titles, you don’t need to specify the search field.

Search fields

title: bugfixing; project: SlothTracker; from: 2020-02-20

This query will search for all tasks that are named “bugfixing” and were stored under the project “SlothTracker” that were started after or equal to 2020-02-20.

Multiple search terms

t: bugfixing,search; p: SlothTracker,features; to: 2020-02-20

This query will search for all tasks for which the following is true:

• task’s title is either “bugfixing” or “search”
• task’s project is either “SlothTracker” or “features”
• the task has ended before or equal to 2020-02-20

Search dialog

Alternatively instead of typing the query and specifying search fields manually, you can use a search dialog which generates the search query for you. You can specify multiple terms for the same field by separating them with a comma (,).

Advanced search (wildcards)

Wildcard allows you to find part of the written term in a special task field. Supported wildcard fields are:

• title
• project
• description

Starts with

title: bug*

This query will find all tasks whose title’s starts with a “bug”, such as “bugfixing”.

Contains

title: *bug*

This query will find all tasks that contains keyword “bug” in their titles, such as “obnoxious bugs”.

Any character

title: ta?k

This query will find all tasks with 4 character titles, such as task or talk.

Import tracked time

It is possible to import existing tasks from the following time tracking applications:

• SlothTracker (csv)
• Toggl (csv)
• Clockify (csv)
• Harvest (csv)
• Hamster tracker (db)
• Kimai (csv)

Export tracked time in a specified format and use File/Import tasks menu option to import the tasks from the file to launch a time importing dialog

If your software is not listed above you can also import tasks from a .csv file that contains data in a SlothTracker format. Mandatory header fields of the .csv file (order does not matter):

• Title
• Project
• Description
• StartTime
• EndTime

Reference SlothTracker .csv file is shown below:

Task, Project, Description, StartTime, EndTime
lunch,Overhead,,2020-01-29T15:00:00+01:00,2020-01-29T16:00:00+01:00
bugfixing,SlothTracker,,2020-01-29T16:00:00+01:00,2020-01-29T18:00:00+01:00
general improvements,SlothTracker,"added task rename dialog, fixed an issue in the edit task dialog",2020-01-29T20:00:00+01:00,2020-01-29T21:40:00+01:00
server administration,SlothTracker server,deploying new server version,2020-01-29T21:40:00+01:00,2020-01-29T22:00:00+01:00

SlothTracker files location

SlothTracker is storing application specific files in the standard application directories depending on the platform.

Application files are:

• SlothTracker database
• User preferences
• Last monitor location (only in multi monitor setup)

Backups

Backup: If you are trying to create a backup of your tracked time database, simply copy the timetrackerDB.db file from RoyalSloth configuration directory (see previous section for the directory location).

Restore: If you would like to restore your tracked time from the backups. simply replace the current database file (see previous section for the directory location) with the backup database file.

SlothTracker secrets

Main screen

• If no task is being tracked, double clicking on task in the table will start tracking a new task with the same title and project as the clicked task.

Edit task dialog

• Clicking on a ‘Time’ label will set starting time of the edited task to the ending time of the previous task. It’s a good way to avoid the gaps between the tasks.

• Clicking on ’to’ label (on the right of the starting time field) will stretch the ending time of the edited task, to the starting time of the next task for that day.

• Alternatively you can execute the ‘Time’ and ’to’ actions via keyboard by holding ALT key and pressing the underlined character.

• Changing time of the task to a new time that overlaps the already existing task will resolve the time conflict in a smart way. If the time overlap is small (you can set the number in the preferences) the already existing task will shrink to avoid the time overlap. If the time overlap is bigger than the overlap resolution duration, a conflict dialog will be displayed with tasks that are overlapping shown in red.

Running Jar

Prerequisites: Make sure you have at least JRE 11 installed.

• Windows, Mac: For running the jar use the following command:

    java -jar SlothTracker.jar
  

• Linux: there is a known issue within the tray library that prevents application from running without specifying the GTK version. For running the jar use the following command:

    java -Djdk.gtk.version=3 -jar SlothTracker.jar
  

  If you are using KDE, make sure to install:

    libappindicator-gtk3