timeman

A terminal based stopwatch and countdown timer, built with OpenTUI and shipped as standalone binaries — no runtime required.

• CLI interface (default): Lightweight inline mode that lives in your scrollback.
• TUI interface: Full-screen terminal UI via -i/--interactive.
• Notifications: Bell + toast when a countdown completes.
• Session timeline: Stopwatch summary with per-session start/end times in your local time zone.
• Session history: Every stopwatch session is saved. Review, delete and retitle them from the TUI with h.
• Drift-proof timing: Durations use a monotonic clock, so a system clock jump (DST, NTP sync) never corrupts them.

Installation

npm:

npm install -g timeman-cli

bun:

bun add -g timeman-cli

pip / uv (same binary, published as time-manager for continuity with the original Python package):

pip install time-manager
# or
uv tool install time-manager

curl (Linux, macOS — downloads the binary from the latest GitHub release):

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rehanhaider/time-manager/main/install.sh | bash

Every method installs the same two commands, tm and its long form timeman, pointing at one binary. Package names differ by registry for historical reasons: timeman-cli on npm, time-manager on PyPI.

Supported platforms: Linux x64/arm64 (glibc and musl), macOS x64/arm64, Windows x64 (via npm/bun).

Usage

tm sw              # stopwatch            (also: tm stopwatch)
tm cd 5 m          # 5-minute countdown   (also: tm countdown 5 m)

Stopwatch

tm sw
tm sw -p "Project Alpha"   # name the session for the summary
tm sw -i                   # full-screen TUI

Keys: space start/stop · r reset · q quit · h history (TUI only).

On exit you get a session timeline — one bar per start/stop run, with total time:

╭──────────────── Project Alpha: 0 hrs 25 mins ────────────────╮
│   Session #1   13:53 ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ 14:03 IST  (0 hrs 10 mins) │
│                                                              │
│   Session #2   14:10 ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ 14:25 IST  (0 hrs 15 mins) │
╰──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╯

Session history

Both modes save every session when you quit. Only the TUI reads them back, so press h from tm sw -i. There is no tm log command.

The first screen rolls your projects up over a billing period, largest first:

       This Week    This Month    Last Month    All Time

             August 2026  ·  11 hrs 52 mins logged

╭────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╮
│   PROJECT                SHARE                           TOTAL    LAST │
│                                                                        │
│  ▸Project Alpha          ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬    4 hrs 10 mins     Sun │
│   Client Review          ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬     4 hrs 5 mins     Mon │
│   Deep Work              ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬           2 hrs 47 mins     Sat │
│   Untitled               ▬▬▬▬                    0 hrs 50 mins     Fri │
╰────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╯

Keys: ↑↓ project · ←→ period · enter line items · esc back · q quit.

enter breaks one project into invoice lines, one per day, with its sessions underneath:

              Client Review  ·  Last Month  ·  4 hrs 5 mins

╭────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╮
│   Mon 31 Aug ─────────────────────────────────────────   2 hrs 25 mins │
│  ▸  13:15 → 15:40                                        2 hrs 25 mins │
│                                                                        │
│   Thu 27 Aug ─────────────────────────────────────────    1 hr 40 mins │
│     10:00 → 11:40                                         1 hr 40 mins │
╰────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╯

Keys: ↑↓ session · d delete · r rename the project · esc back · q quit.

A row shows the wall-clock span alongside the time actually on the clock. Pause mid-session and the duration comes out shorter than the span. d asks for y/n on the row itself. r retitles every session filed under that project, which is how Untitled gets fixed after you forget -p.

Sessions live in a SQLite database at ~/.local/share/timeman/history.db, or ~/Library/Application Support/timeman on macOS and %LOCALAPPDATA%\timeman on Windows. TIMEMAN_HOME overrides that directory. The newest 5,000 sessions are kept.

Countdown

tm cd 90 s         # units: s/sec/seconds, m/min/minutes, h/hr/hours
tm cd 5            # unit defaults to minutes
tm cd 1 h -i       # full-screen TUI

Keys: space pause/resume · q quit. The display turns yellow under 30 seconds and red under 10; when time is up you get a terminal bell and a toast.

Development

Requires Bun >= 1.3.14.

bun install                      # install dependencies
bun run dev sw                   # run from source
bun test                         # tests
bunx tsc --noEmit                # typecheck

Building distribution artifacts:

bun install --os="*" --cpu="*"   # stage native packages for every platform (one-time)
make build                       # compile binaries for all 7 targets into dist/bin
make package                     # assemble npm packages (dist/npm) + release tarballs (dist/release)

Releasing

Everything publishes locally from this machine — no CI, no secrets on GitHub.

1. make bump (or TYPE=minor make bump), commit.
2. make package — builds all binaries, npm packages, wheels, and release tarballs.
3. make publish — rehearsal: npm --dry-run + TestPyPI.
4. PROD=TRUE make publish — the real thing: npm packages, PyPI wheels, and a GitHub release v<version> with the binaries (which the curl installer downloads).

Credentials: npm token in ~/.npmrc, PyPI tokens in .env (PYPI_PUBLISH_TOKEN, TEST_PYPI_PUBLISH_TOKEN), and an authenticated gh CLI for the release upload.

History

This project was originally written in Python with Textual and published to PyPI as time-manager (last Python release: 0.3.1; the implementation is preserved in git history). From 0.4.0 on, the PyPI package ships the same compiled binary as the npm package — pip install time-manager keeps working with no Python runtime involved.

License

MIT