Hamster is time tracking for individuals. It helps you to keep track of how much time you have spent during the day on activities you choose to track.

Some additional information is available in the wiki and a static copy of the user documentation is online here.

During the period 2015-2017 there was a major effort to rewrite hamster (repositories: hamster-lib/dbus/cli/gtk). Unfortunately, after considerable initial progress the work has remained in alpha state for some time now. Hopefully the effort will be renewed in the future.

In the meantime, this sub-project aims to revive development of the "legacy" Hamster code base, maintaining database compatibility with the widely installed v1.04, but migrating to Gtk3 and python3. This will allow package maintainers to provide new packages for recent releases of mainstream Linux distributions for which the old 1.04-based versions are no longer provided.

With respect to 1.04, some of the GUI ease of use has been lost, especially for handling tags, and the stats display is minimal now. So if you are happy with your hamster application and it is still available for your distribution, upgrade is not recommended yet.

In the meantime recent (v2.2+) releases have good backward data compatibility and are reasonably usable. The aim is to provide a new stable v3.0 release in the coming months (i.e. late 2019).

You can use the usually stable master or download stable releases.

If you upgraded from an existing installation make sure to kill the running daemons:

pkill -f hamster-service
pkill -f hamster-windows-service
# check (should be empty)
pgrep -af hamster

sudo apt install gettext intltool gconf2 gir1.2-gconf-2.0 python3-gi-cairo python3-distutils python3-dbus python3-xdg
# and for documentation
sudo apt install gnome-doc-utils yelp

Leap-15.0 and Leap-15.1:

sudo zypper install intltool python3-pyxdg python3-cairo python3-gobject-Gdk
sudo zypper install gnome-doc-utils xml2po yelp

RPM-based instructions below should be updated for python3 (issue #369).

yum install gettext intltool gnome-python2-gconf dbus-python

If the hamster help pages are not accessible ("unable to open help:hamster-time-tracker"), then a Mallard-capable help reader is required, such as yelp.

To use the development version (backup hamster.db first !):

# either
pgrep -af hamster
# and kill them one by one
# or be bold and kill all process with "hamster" in their command line
pkill -ef hamster
src/hamster-service &
src/hamster-windows-service &
src/hamster-cli

./waf configure build
# thanks to the parentheses the umask of your shell will not be changed
( umask 0022 && sudo ./waf install; )

The umask 0022 is safe for all, but important for users with more restrictive umask, as discussed here.

Now restart your panels/docks and you should be able to add Hamster!

./waf configure
sudo ./waf uninstall

Previously Hamster was installed everywhere under hamster-applet. As the applet is long gone, the paths and file names have changed to hamster-time-tracker. To clean up previous installs follow these steps:

git checkout d140d45f105d4ca07d4e33bcec1fae30143959fe
./waf configure build --prefix=/usr
sudo ./waf uninstall

1. Fork this project
2. Create a topic branch - git checkout -b my_branch
3. Push to your branch - git push origin my_branch
4. Submit a Pull Request with your branch
5. That's it!

See How to contribute for more information.