arttime is a command-line interface program that blends the beauty of ASCII or text art with clock / timer / pattern-based time management functionality in the terminal. arttime is a human-readable text file.
This is free and open source software.
Installation
We evaluated arttime with the Manjaro distribution.
Pamac (Manjaro’s front-end installation tool) lets us install arttime from the Arch User Repository (AUR).
The AUR is a community-driven repository. It contains package descriptions (PKGBUILDs) that allow users to compile a package from source with makepkg and then install it via the in-house pacman, a lightweight, simple and fast package manager that allows for continuously upgrading the entire system with one command.
The program installs without any fuss or bother. It installs a couple of shell scripts (artprint and arttime) as well a a variety of animations and text art.
arttime is cross-platform software. Besides Linux it runs under *BSD and macOS.
In Operation
This is what we see when starting the program. We’ve changed the art color. With our default hyper terminal, it’s also best to change the theme so that the message is clearer than shown below.
There’s over 500 ASCII and text art available which can be chosen at random, by name, or via fzf. Here’s an example of the text art.
There’s also support for animated text.
Alarm timer and time manager
The software offers a rather rich set of features for alarm timers and time management. We can set multiple timers, define pattern-based time management, as well as interactively switch time zones. There’s also a configurable text-based progress bar.
There’s native desktop notifications for timers. Here’s example output.
Goals
The software lets you define multiple goals, and even sprint (loop) over a pattern of goals multiple times. Multiple goals or a pattern of goals can be specified by separating them with a semi-colon (;).
Goals can be repeated by specifying the last goal as ‘loop’/’sprint’ (to sprint forever) or ‘loopN’/’sprintN’ (to sprint N number of times).
Summary
On first glance, you might think that arttime is a curio. But it’s actually a useful and powerful CLI tool. For example, we can feed keytstrokes from a string, file, pipe, or even an unrelated process. This lets you use arttime to display dynamic information including weather, and stock market feeds.
arttime is extremely frugal with system resources, it offers tons of customization including the ability to associate different art, color, and messages with timers, and doesn’t require a net connection.
artprint is a script that offers consistent art and message display in multiple applications.
Website: github.com/poetaman/arttime
Support:
Developer: poetaman
License: GNU General Public License v3.0
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Read our verdict in the software roundup.
 Explore our comprehensive directory of recommended free and open source software. Our carefully curated collection spans every major software category.This directory is part of our ongoing series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. It features hundreds of detailed reviews, along with open source alternatives to proprietary solutions from major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. You’ll also find interesting projects to try, hardware coverage, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Discovered a useful open source Linux program that we haven’t covered yet? Let us know by completing this form. |