I recently fell in love with VS Code and use it for a number of unrelated things. But with me being pro at procrastination I would like to beemind my use of VS Code. But I can’t use rescuetime to track my time spent in there because it simply won’t differentiate between different projects.
So I was thinking of creating a VS Code Extension that does workspace aware tracking and uses the beeminder API to submit data points.
With this you could even go so far as to include, say, git commit messages or something as description of the data points.
As a side effect I expect this will make you use your editor more actively and stop having all these external terminals running but use the ones integrated in VS Code instead. Like you should.
I have done a great many (sometimes even useful) things but have never written a VS Code extension before.
And I think this would be a great time for some pair programming, using the liveshare feature. Because there gotta be someone here who also uses VS Code, right?
I figured after this overwhelming response I gotta give this a go, so here is the result of a hard 30 minutes work
Yes, this is using the “bmndr” command line too under the hood.
Yes, I have never written type script in my life before.
Yes, I should be doing other things right now but what the heck this was fun.
No, I normally refresh pages with Cmd+R instead of clicking. I guess I felt silly.
Since the bmndr command line tool seems a bit unmaintained I want to use the beeminder REST API directly eventually. But for a quick try this ain’t tea bag I say.
I hope it will allow RescueTime to gain more detailed statistics than just “spent x hours in VS Code”.
If so, then it will at least partially do what I hope to achieve with a VS code extension: Record the time I spent on individual projects.
I’ll report back when I know more.
