Plugin that adds a stopwatch mode

1

Note I expect to include this plugin in the default FoldingText distribution in the future. I’m sharing now to get some feedback. How do you like it? How can it be better?

After installing this plugin you can use stopwatch mode by:

  1. Type a line with the text my.stopwatch.
  2. Click the green “play” button to start the stopwatch.
  3. Click the red “pause” button to stop it.

When the stopwatch is running time elapsed is displayed to the left of the stopwatch play/pause button. When you stop a playing stopwatch the duration is entered in an unordered list indented under the stopwatch (so you have a history). When the stopwatch is not running the total duration of all past session entries is displayed to the left of the stopwatch.

Here it is:

Here it is running:

Here it is after a few start/stop sequences:

The stopwatch mode plugin is available (along with others) from FoldingText’s official plugin collection.

2

Nice and handy plugin. But, the last sentence you call it the reverse text plugin. Copy paste leads to problems!

3

Oh my god. Beautiful. I can see using this every day.

I had expected the timer plugin to behave like a stopwatch, so maybe it’s me but this seems a lot more intuitive. The go and stop buttons are perfect. You “get” it immediately. I think the presence of this would make timer easier to grok because it’d be clearer what it is not.

4

I think the existing “timer” is very useful, but probably incorrectly named. In the future I think I’d like to use the name “timer” to implement a “countdown” functionality. That means the existing “timer” mode needs a new name. Any ideas… maybe “schedule” or something like that?

5

Nice plugin, Jesse! I think this will be a great addition to the default modes.

6

“Schedule” sure rings the right bells for me, and it would seem to read better in the resulting plain text headings.

7

Brilliant idea and plugin Jesse. As for the new name for the current timer mode, maybe something akin to interval timer, timed steps.

8

Thanks Jesse—I was thinking of requesting a stopwatch mode! Do you think people wild find it useful to also have the time stamp, in addition to the total time? For example, if I worked 35 minutes on a project, stopping the watch would give me “35 min (Jun 16, 2014 6:00:00 AM – Jun 16, 2014 6:35:00 AM)”. That may be too much for the purposes of this stopwatch, but might be useful.

9

@sjs43b Good idea, I think that makes a lot of sense, I’ll try to add it in next release.

10

Very excited about this; I would most certainly use it. I also agree with @sjs43b about having the option for a timestamp.

11

Even more useful to me would be the ability to append the stopwatch functionality to the todo lists. I realize that the “modes” don’t currently combine, but those are the kinds of things I’d like to track. How difficult would it be to sum the times across multiple items or show the total time of items under a heading, for example?

12

@jafish

Not sure if this is what you want, but you can insert a stopwatch inside your todo list like this:

my.todo
	- one
	- two
		.stopwatch
		- 2 seconds
	- three
13

Thanks Jesse—This definitely works. I’ve been using a timestamp before the “.stopwatch” (e.g., 8:25 AM.stopwatch), so that I know when I started.

14

That does help, but I was hoping for functionality akin to OmniOutliner’s “summary type” for its columns. On a per-node basis, I’d like to be able to ask FoldingText to include a sum of the stopwatches of the nodes below (if there are any) to answer: How much time have I spent on this task/project/node?

Is this something that could/should be done with a plugin?

15

The stopwatch feature is awesome! I’m using it every day to allocate time to 1-3-5 priorities. Is there any way to run a daily summary of how much time was spent on each “stopwatch”/priority and add up total time spent?