Zeit v1

Summary

Zeit began nearly five years ago as a pet project. I needed a lightweight, user-friendly tool to track time, with the added capability to export data for integration with other, mostly home-brewed software used for accounting and invoicing. At the time, I had only a basic set of features in mind and no clear long-term plan for the tool. Little did I know that I seemingly wasn’t alone in my need for a time tracker that stays out of the way and doesn’t come with an attached (paid) cloud service.The history of Zeit v0Whenever users requested new features or options, I either implemented them myself or accepted their pull requests without much hesitation. My guiding principle was simple: If a small enhancement could make the software more useful to even one other person, I was happy to introduce it.Nearly five years after its initial release, Zeit has stood the test of time (hah) quite well and continues to grow in popularity on GitHub. What began as a minimal command-line time-tracking utility has evolved into a more feature-rich program. Depending on your perspective, you might say it now has a few too many features.Fast forward to today, and the first version of Zeit (referred to as zeit v0) has strayed far from its original goal of being a clean, minimal command-line tool. Instead, it has grown into an unwieldy user experience, cluttered with features that are neither intuitive nor well thought out. From a code standpoint, many of the decisions that made sense a few years ago now seem suboptimal, especially as we look to the future.While I could have sifted through the original v0 codebase to clean it up and remove features that were added by contributors who eventually stopped maintaining them, I opted to rewrite Zeit from scratch. The new version is built on more modern dependencies, with a cleaner, more streamlined codebase, and is free of the “one-off” features added for individual users who no longer appear to use Zeit.A full rewrite: Zeit v1Over the past five ...