Simple egg timer on Linux for Pomodoro technique

Sun, Dec 19, 2010

Recently I have started evaluating the Pomodoro Technique which I found quite interesting. I am still evaluating the technique and not yet concluded on whether I should continue using it.

To implement pomodoro technique, you need a kitchen timer or egg timer. Since I use pomodoro for my programming work, I obviously don’t want to use a physical timer. I couldn’t find a decent timer for linux especially one that works well with Xfce. In this blog post, I will explain building a kitchen timer with basic linux programming techniques. This also gives an idea about how simple linux tools can be combined to do useful stuff.

Things that are used

Shell scripting
Notification mechanisms on popular desktops like Gnome and Xfce. (I use Xfce in this example)

The shell script is actually a modified version of the one published here (http://mostlylinux.wordpress.com/commandline/eggtimer/).

#!/bin/bash
counter=0
limit=$1
summary=$2
startmessage=$3
endmessage=$4
notify-send -u critical -i appointment -t 600 "$summary" "$startmessage"
echo
while [ $counter != $limit ]; do
   echo "$counter minutes so far...";
   sleep 60
   let "counter = $counter + 1"
done
if [ $counter = $limit ]; then
   echo
   notify-send -u critical -i appointment "$summary" "$endmessage"
   echo -e '\a' &gt;&amp;2
   exit 0
fi

All it does is wait until the limit reaches. It uses the sleep(1) command to sleep for a minute. notify-send is used for sending notifications to the desktop environment.

This script can be invoked using,

./p-timer.sh

If you use bash, you can add an alias for convenience.

alias begin-pomodoro='sh ~/utils/p-timer.sh 25 "Pomodoro" "Pomodoro started, you have 25 minutes left" "Pomodoro ended. Please stop the work and take short break"'

This post is written on one pomodoro!

Happy programming!