Record active window titles to assist in writing time sheets. Should work on most Unix-like, X-windows systems.

recordfocussedwindow.sh

#! /bin/bash

# Kevin Whitefoot <[email protected]>
# 2018-02-23
#

# Record the foreground window title every 30 seconds.

# Used to help write time sheets

# Output is lines of:

#  ISO 8601 date space hh:mm:ss space hostname space title

# The purpose of the host name is so that we can merge files from
# several machines and just sort them to have a complete log in
# date-time order.


# See
# https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/38867/is-it-possible-to-retrieve-the-active-window-process-title-in-gnome#122870,
# specifically the answer by
# https://unix.stackexchange.com/users/64271/eric edited by
# https://unix.stackexchange.com/users/33055/anthon.

# Dependencies:

# - date
# - xdotool
# - shell (bash is presumably overkill)

h="$(hostname)"

while [ 0 ]
do
    d=$(date '+%F %T')
    n=$(xdotool getactivewindow getwindowname)
    if [ "$n" != "$p" ]
    then
        echo "$h $d $n"
	    p="$n"
    fi
    sleep 30s
done