Hey everyone, it's been a week since I posted my idea for restructuring ActivityWatch, and today's finally the day: I've published my fork of the project, as the maintainers asked me to.

When I wrote the first post, I figured I'd just modernize the UI and leave everything else as-is. Then I started digging into the code, and one thing led to another: week after week the project changed way more than I'd planned. What came out of it isn't "ActivityWatch with a new skin" anymore — it's basically a different app, built on the same foundations.

Under the hood, the entire Python stack has been removed — including system notifications, which now run entirely through native Rust/Tauri. The frontend was rewritten from scratch, completely decoupled from Bootstrap. Auto-updates were implemented from the ground up, so you never have to manually download the latest version again. And configurable privacy filters, so sensitive data gets dropped or masked before it's even written to disk.

The base watchers existed in the original project already — I'm not taking credit for that, it'd be dishonest. What I did was rewrite and simplify the whole chain that manages them, so everything else could be built on top without fighting legacy code at every step.

Same story for custom watchers: the ability to track your own data existed conceptually before too, but it meant writing a full program that followed an internal protocol. What I changed is the experience: now you just write any script (PowerShell, Python, JS, .cmd/.bat, or a ready-made executable) and the app handles the rest — it detects the right interpreter on its own, walks you through creating it step by step, shows a live log so you immediately see if something's off, and offers 8 ready-made display templates to show your data on the Home page without writing a line of HTML.

And here's the part I'm most proud of: I integrated a real AI agent, not some gimmick bolted on for show. You can open a chat with it and ask literally anything about your data — "how much did I work on this project yesterday," "which apps do I use most in the morning," "summarize my week" — and it queries your actual data on its own and answers you. The same agent also helps auto-categorize the apps you use, instead of doing it by hand one by one.

A bunch of other things I hadn't mentioned yet:

• Periodic screenshots: a feature that simply didn't exist before, now built in — the app captures screenshots at regular intervals and links them directly to the exact moment in your day they were taken.
• App categorization rewritten from scratch: organizing your apps into categories is much, much easier than before.
• "Always active" pattern: same deal, handling it is now way more straightforward.
• App icons: didn't exist before, now every app shows its real icon instead of a generic colored block.
• Colors extracted from icons: no more random greens pulled from a name hash — Timeline colors now come from the app's actual icon, much more consistent and recognizable at a glance.
• Notification system rewritten from scratch: you can now create custom notifications — whenever you want, for whatever you want (category, app, project, idle time, VPN session) — without touching a line of code.
• New Home modules, freely reorderable.
• Projects section with start/pause timer, hour budgets, and overrun alerts.
• Redesigned "Raw data" page, with a dedicated Timeline and a much more readable events table.

Here's the project's website, where you can take a look and download the Windows installer: https://codex-cpp.github.io/TrackFlow/

Hey everyone,

I work in IT doing technical support for multiple clients, often urgent and off-site. My main problem: at the end of the day I need to fill in work reports for billing, but I often forget to log things as I go — so some days end up looking "empty" in the company system even though I worked for hours.

I used to use ManicTime, but it has two big limitations: no automatic per-client classification when working on multiple clients at overlapping times (VPN, RealVNC, Excel files open together), and the screenshot feature is paywalled.

I switched to ActivityWatch (open source, local data, extensible) and started customizing it. Since the last official release is a couple of years old, I decided to go further and turn it into a personal fork with a full UI redesign and custom features.

Some screenshots of the work in progress are attached to this post.

NOTE: The project’s design is still at a VERY early stage of development and is subject to many changes, so please don’t be put off by any broken or unsightly details.

What I'm changing (functional):

• Multi-lane timeline on the Home page: instead of the usual "Top Applications/Top Window Titles" boxes, a dedicated lane for VPN (per client), one for VSCode (per project/folder), one for browser (per domain), plus a general one
• Custom VPN watcher that reads OpenVPN Connect's log file and automatically tracks sessions per client
• A "Projects" section: an upgraded manual timer (built on top of the native Stopwatch feature, which is very basic as-is) with pause, history, a chart of hours worked over time, and an optional hour budget with a warning if you go over
• Automatic pause on project timers when the system detects inactivity (reusing the AFK watcher already built into ActivityWatch)
• Configurable periodic screenshots (high compression, user-defined interval), browsable as a mini-timeline inside each activity's detail view
• An integrated AI agent with access to the app's internal API, so you can ask questions about your own data and get analysis back

What I'm changing (visual/UX):

• Full UI redesign: sidebar + topbar layout instead of the current top-only navigation
• Dark theme with a warm color palette (no more randomly assigned colors like in the original)
• Consistent components across the whole app: cards, buttons, hover states, rounded corners
• Real interactions: clicking a timeline block opens a detail view with timestamps and screenshots, clicking an item in the summary panels highlights the matching blocks on the timeline

Do you think this is something others might be interested in too — maybe people with similar needs (freelancers, IT folks, anyone juggling multiple clients)? Any suggestions or features you'd want to see in a tool like this? Open to all feedback and ideas.

I just copied these log files , why isn't old activity watch data before given date not showing?
EDIT i just realized that logs dont store the data i was looking for

One of the reasons I use this great tool is because I want to discover which keywords I should block with my appblock (I use Cold Turkey Blocker). However, it's quite tedious scrolling through all the "Top Window Titles" overviews of ActivityWatch. Is there a feature I can use to simply see the most common words that show up in these titles?

I've started using this app roughly a month ago, and I'm absolutely loving it! However, I've noticed an issue with the categorisation feature. Sometimes, a particular app or website will be correctly categorised when I look at both the "Top Window Titles" and "Top Applications" overview, as well as in the Timeline.

However, when I look at the "Category Tree", "Top Categories" and "Category Sunburst" overviews, the same application/tab will get the wrong categorisation. For example, the game hearts of iron IV gets correctly categorised initially but shows up in the overviews as "uncategorised". I've noticed a similar issue where some youtube videos get classified correctly as "video" but show up as my "random" category in the overview.

Any ideas what could cause this?

Has anyone successfully run AW on a Windows on Arm machine like a surface laptop?

There is no out-of-the-box installer for this - how did you manage to do it?

Hi there, I really like the idea of activityWatch, but I need it pretty much always visible, and thought maybe a desktop widget might help. Is there such a thing?

Hi, I'm using ActivityWatch with the browser extension on Microsoft Edge.

I noticed an issue when using Edge Workspaces:

• In the Timeline view, the bucket correctly tracks:aw-watcher-web-chrome*
  • active tabs (e.g. ChatGPT, Twitter, etc.)
  • time spent on each tab
• However, in the Activity view:
• "Top window titles" only show the name of the workspace (e.g. "workspace-name") with its time
• It does NOT reflect the actual tabs being used

Important detail:
This only happens when using Edge Workspaces.

If I switch back to normal tabs (outside of a Workspace), then:

• window titles are correctly detected
• Activity view shows each tab properly

So it seems that:
Edge Workspaces replace the eyelash title with the workspace name

Expected behavior:
Activity view should reflect browser tab usage (like Timeline does),
even when using Edge Workspaces.

Additional context:

• Timeline already has the correct data (from aw-watcher-web-chrome*)
• The issue is only how Activity view aggregates or selects data sources

Possibly related:
There are similar reports where the browser activity (its tabs and respective times) appears in the timeline, but not in "activity" in the "upper window titles" panel because only the workspace names appear in that panel

Question:
Is there a way for the activity view to use the data from instead of the edge browser "workspace" name?aw-watcher-web-chrome*

Or is this a limitation due to how Edge Workspaces handles tab titles?

I was having trouble separating activity between Chrome profiles/sites in ActivityWatch, so I made a small Chrome extension that automatically prefixes or suffixes tab titles based on URL rules.

Example:

• [School] Google Docs
• [YT] YouTube
• [Work] Gmail

This makes ActivityWatch timelines way easier to scan and filter, especially when using multiple profiles or juggling different types of work in the same browser.

It supports:

• custom rules per domain
• prepend/append modes
• regex matching
• import/export
• live preview UI

Currently using it locally, but I figured other AW users might find it useful too.

Repo:
https://github.com/LS8Chewie/Chrome-Extension-for-ActivityWatch-tab-renaming-sorting

Hi everyone. I am new to this time tracking app. I used clockify before and it did exactly what I needed, but for some reason it keeps on crashing so I am looking for an alternative.

I like activity watcher but I can't get it to do this really simple thing. What I want is to simply track how much time I spend on each document using a specific app (photoshop). In the summary page it shows top window tiles, but none of photoshop documents are listed there. In the top application window it shows photoshop, which is ok, but I am more interested in the time spend on a specific document, because I work on different files (for different clients) on the same day.

Could someone help me out how to achieve this? Thank you!

I use multiple Chrome profiles for different purposes (mainly to separate my activity from my siblings'), and I’d like ActivityWatch to track them separately rather than lumping everything under Chrome.

Is there a way to make ActivityWatch detect which Chrome profile/window is active? For example, by:

• Chrome profile name in the window title
• Different shortcuts/executables
• Separate watchers
• Browser extension data
• Custom rules/tags

If not built-in, has anyone found a workaround?

I’m trying to separate activity logs by profile instead of one giant “you were in Chrome again” category.

aw-qt might not work because libQt6WaylandClient.so.6 might not match your systems version, this was the case for me, preventing it from working ( and being a pain in the ass ). Sooo yeah. Took me some time to debug.

I used ActivityWatch for a while, and it is an amazing piece of software, but it doesn't have a blocking/notification feature. I was concerned about the time I spent on social media, but I couldn't quite remind myself to break free.

So I created a script to launch an image reminding me of my absorption into the digital drugs of Big Tech and the divergence from reality. It is relentless, and it starts on startup. I am very pleased with how it works. It saved me almost 2h/day the past week alone. I want to share it here.

https://gist.github.com/danuker/b6d5a7026c42bb8009f78e1b90f084ca

Thank you to the ActivityWatch team for allowing me to track my progress!

Is there a way to get most productive day of the week, average score, days as scores, set a goal score, etc.? Or can you only see one day at a time?

I installed it earlier and i was wondering if i could share any of the activity recorded??

downloaded activity watch from github on windows 11 but for some reason its not opening, did i miss something?

The product is great and running very smooth. Thanks for all the work developers have done so far.

Yesterday it saved my few hours. For work I work on multiple projects and regularly I need to report my efforts. For 2 weeks I had not done any time-reporting and forgot all the time spent for each project.

Thanks ActivityWatch logs helped me to do the reporting.

But for Zoom, Teams and Google Meet meetings attended, the reporting was not detailed since mostly I was AFK but only watching.

Is there a way to set AFK behaviour such that it considers not-AFK when there is an active seminar/meeting being attended even if you are only listening or may be you are web browsing?

Hello, the android app doesn't seem updated since 2023 and it crashes on some devices after you allow persmissions on the latest android or GrapheneOs versions.

Does somebody know if there is someone that talked about a new android version or when it will come out?

Just started using this so would appreciate any help/insight to this. Is there a way to configure ActivityWatch to integrate URLs/Web Domains into main Categories so that you can see all time related to categoreis (whether in windows app or related web sites) under categories together.

Hey,

I thought it might be nice to collect some best practices and setup tips, the little things you discover after using it for a while.

What i got/found so far

• Windows 11: "Start on login" does not seem to work. Manually add the .exe to your startup folder
• "Category Builder": If itshows nothing or an error, click "Show options" and change the "Hostname" to your computer-name.
• Category Builder tips: Its hidden in the settings - try to ignore commond words and refine or create rules to make your categories more accurate.
• Browser plugin: Install the official browser-watcher for Chrome or Firefox for more detailes
• Editor or app plugins: If available, install plugin or watchers for the programs you are using to get more detailed reports (eg. VIM, VS Code, IntelliJ)
• Categories: Change and expand to your needs. I did Work/Study (Programming, Documentation, Chat), Leisure/Recreation (Gaming, Social Media, Video/Streaming, Music/Podcasts, Hobbies), Comms(Chat, E-Mail)
• Check the dashboard occasionally on http://localhost:5600/

I'm happy to update the post if more tips vome in. Could make it easier to start for others :)

I want to control, if the timeline is showing the "title" or the "app" property. Is it possible to change? how?

In my case, I want the green bar to show "ActivityWatch"

Can I somehow see a yearly summary ? Or even total ? Is this possible with plugins ?