bashbreak is a lightweight program that reminds you to take regular breaks.
Taking regular breaks increases focus and prevents repetitive strain injury; it's good for you, but easy to forget. bashbreak reminds you to take a break and move around regularly.
You have two kinds of breaks during a work session: short and long. By default, you have 10 min work sprints, separated by short breaks of 1 min. After four such work sprints there is a long break of 15 min. Thus, each work session including breaks totals 1 h. You can of course change the settings to your liking.
When a break is over, bashbreak checks if you are active at the computer before it starts the next work sprint.
You can specify the number of work sessions you want by running bashbreak with the -n option. If you plan to work for a total of 4 work sessions (i.e., 4 hours with the default settings), type:
bashbreak -n 4
By default, bashbreak runs in the current terminal so you may want to fork it to the background using the -B flag. You can quit a background session with bashbreak -q.
You can see the current status (i.e. how much time left until next break) with bashbreak -s; a tip is to map this command to a keybind to quickly see the status as a notification.
Type bashbreak -h to see all available commands.
To install, download this repo and run the install script:
git clone https://github.com/mrtgst/bashbreak.git
cd bashbreak
sudo ./setup install
This will copy bashbreak to /usr/local/bin/ and a default config file to /etc/bashbreak/.
To create a user-specific config file that won't get reset on update, run:
cp /etc/bashbreak/bashbreak.conf /home/$USER/.config/bashbreak.conf
To remove bashbreak and its config files you can call the above setup-script with sudo ./setup uninstall.
bashbreak can run just in your terminal using bash builtins, but the desktop notifications and idle time checker have some further dependencies.
To see desktop notifications you need libnotify and a notification daemon installed, which is standard on most Linux distros running a desktop environment. If you are not running a full DE, see wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Desktop_notifications.
To check for user idle time, bashbreak uses xprintidle, which further assumes you are running the X Window System.
Written by Martin Gustavsson, released under GPLv3 license.