Concepts

This chapter explains Track's primary concepts.

To start using Track immediately, you can skip to chapter Time tracking and come back here if something seems unclear.

• Records
• Projects
• Command line interface
• File formats

Records

Time tracking entries are organized in records.

Each record is associated to a project. A record is defined as a contiguous time span spent on a project. It is characterized by it's start and end time.

Each records can contain an arbitrary number of pauses. Each pause is characterized by a start time and a duration.

Further, each record can have a note and tags.

For details, see chapter Time tracking.

Projects

Projects are the primary way of structuring time tracking in Track. Projects can be organized in a hierarchical tree-like structure.

For details, see chapter Projects.

Command line interface

The command line interface heavily relies on nested subcommands. This allows for a natural language-like syntax, like

track list records yesterday

For normal usage, flags (i.e. options prefixed with -- or -) are rarely required.

Further, all subcommands can be abbreviated by their first letter (with a few exceptions that use a different character or two letters). E.g. this is equivalent to the above list command:

track l r yesterday

For the full subcommand tree, see appendix Command tree.

File formats

Track uses a human-readable plain-text format to store records. This allows for easy editing, simply using a text editor.

A time tracking record looks like this:

8:15 - 17:00
    - 10:15 - 15m / Breakfast
    - 13:00 - 30m / Lunch
    
    ProjectA

Work on +GUI +design

Track provides an edit command that opens the entries to be edited in a temporary file, and performs checks before replacing the original data. See chapter Manipulating data for details.