Building a full redesign + custom features fork of ActivityWatch — looking for feedback
Hey everyone,
I work in IT doing technical support for multiple clients, often urgent and off-site. My main problem: at the end of the day I need to fill in work reports for billing, but I often forget to log things as I go — so some days end up looking "empty" in the company system even though I worked for hours.
I used to use ManicTime, but it has two big limitations: no automatic per-client classification when working on multiple clients at overlapping times (VPN, RealVNC, Excel files open together), and the screenshot feature is paywalled.
I switched to ActivityWatch (open source, local data, extensible) and started customizing it. Since the last official release is a couple of years old, I decided to go further and turn it into a personal fork with a full UI redesign and custom features.
Some screenshots of the work in progress are attached to this post.
NOTE: The project’s design is still at a VERY early stage of development and is subject to many changes, so please don’t be put off by any broken or unsightly details.
What I'm changing (functional):
- Multi-lane timeline on the Home page: instead of the usual "Top Applications/Top Window Titles" boxes, a dedicated lane for VPN (per client), one for VSCode (per project/folder), one for browser (per domain), plus a general one
- Custom VPN watcher that reads OpenVPN Connect's log file and automatically tracks sessions per client
- A "Projects" section: an upgraded manual timer (built on top of the native Stopwatch feature, which is very basic as-is) with pause, history, a chart of hours worked over time, and an optional hour budget with a warning if you go over
- Automatic pause on project timers when the system detects inactivity (reusing the AFK watcher already built into ActivityWatch)
- Configurable periodic screenshots (high compression, user-defined interval), browsable as a mini-timeline inside each activity's detail view
- An integrated AI agent with access to the app's internal API, so you can ask questions about your own data and get analysis back
What I'm changing (visual/UX):
- Full UI redesign: sidebar + topbar layout instead of the current top-only navigation
- Dark theme with a warm color palette (no more randomly assigned colors like in the original)
- Consistent components across the whole app: cards, buttons, hover states, rounded corners
- Real interactions: clicking a timeline block opens a detail view with timestamps and screenshots, clicking an item in the summary panels highlights the matching blocks on the timeline
Do you think this is something others might be interested in too — maybe people with similar needs (freelancers, IT folks, anyone juggling multiple clients)? Any suggestions or features you'd want to see in a tool like this? Open to all feedback and ideas.