Pomodoro timer for linux [closed]

Posted on

Problem :

Is there good Pomodoro desktop timer for Linux without a lot of dependencies.

I know about pomodairo, but it’s made with Adobe Air, which I don’t want on my Linux (even if it exists for Linux).

Solution :

If you’re into minimalistic approaches, I’d suggest one I found here, that uses the Terminal:

sleep 1500 && notify-send "break"

Where 1500 stands for “1500 seconds”, which is equivalent to 25 minutes. In order to take breaks, you should issue the following:

sleep 300 && notify-send "back to work"  # a short, 5-minute break
sleep 900 && notify-send "back to work"  # a long, 15-minute break

Of course, you can also issue the whole thing at once, like this:

sleep 1500 && notify-send "break"; sleep 300 && notify-send "back to work"
sleep 1500 && notify-send "break"; sleep 300 && notify-send "back to work"
sleep 1500 && notify-send "break"; sleep 300 && notify-send "back to work"
sleep 1500 && notify-send "break"; sleep 900 && notify-send "back to work"

This approach uses visual and silent notifications, which I find ideal, but I’m sure you can tweak it to give you a beep instead of a notification, in case you prefer.

Of course, you can also go crazy and add subtitles, icons, and different urgency levels. You can run man notify-send to see the options or check out this nice article that I’ve found to be quite helpful. I’ve also published software on GitHub that does this, feel free to fork or contribute to the upstream repo.

You may also use zenity to have a more sticky notification. For example:

sleep 1500 && zenity --warning --text="25 minutes passed"

The dialog won’t close until you explicitly push the OK button. Run man zenity for more information.

I am using Flowkeeper which needs Java.

enter image description here

EDIT: Linux isn’t supported anymore

Tomighty is an option, though it requires Java.

Tomighty in Ubuntu

Consider Workrave, as it has software packages (eg. an Ubuntu package, workrave) available. It appears to be mostly written in C++.

See this blog post on pomodoro with Workrave.

I also notice that there’s an “idle” feature (which is probably not helpful for practicing pomodoro) built into Workrave. Also see this blog post on adjusting idle time.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *