A local attention ledger for Wayland (Niri, Hyprland, Sway, river) and Quickshell.
attn measures where focus actually goes across applications, and which domains receive browser time (Chromium-family and Firefox-family). It's intentionally observational: no blocking, no streaks. It records local evidence, surfaces a discreet indicator in your bar, and optionally pings a desktop notification when a break is overdue or a daily budget is reached.
Status: V1, single-user, NixOS-tested with Niri + Quickshell, also runs on Hyprland, Sway, and river via the
focus_source.kindconfig. The Rust daemon and CLI build on any Linux with/proc; the Quickshell widget is the optional UI layer.
| Week | Settings | Paused |
|---|---|---|
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- App focus time from your compositor's IPC (Niri, Hyprland, Sway, river — auto-detected, overridable via
focus_source.kind). - Terminal subprocess. If you're in
ghosttyand runclaude, the daemon attributes time toclaude, notghostty. Detection uses (1) window title, (2) live tmux query if tmux is in the descendant tree, (3) a/procdescendant walk with start-time tiebreak. - Browser domain time for Chromium-family (Helium, Brave, Chrome, Chromium) and Firefox-family (Firefox, Zen, LibreWolf, Floorp) browsers, clipped to intervals where that browser actually had focus. Domain time can never grow while the browser is unfocused.
- Idle handling. A focused interval that doesn't change for 5 minutes is capped, so an unattended tab doesn't inflate today's total.
No blocking. No alerts. No interventions. No cloud sync. No telemetry. No per-tab live tracking. No AI summaries. No streaks or scores. If you want behavior change, this is the wrong tool. It's a notebook, not a coach.
All state is local. The SQLite ledger lives at ~/.local/state/attn/attn.sqlite (mode 0600). The Unix socket lives at $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/attn.sock (user-only). Browser history is snapshot-copied before reading, then deleted. The daemon never reads live against your browser and has no network code path.
Requires a supported Wayland compositor running: niri, Hyprland, Sway, or river. Without one, app tracking won't do anything.
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/0xPD33/attn/main/scripts/install.sh | shWhat it does: fetches the latest GitHub Release tarball, verifies its sha256, places the attn binary at ~/.local/bin/attn, runs attn init or attn init --merge for the config, and drops a systemd user unit at ~/.config/systemd/user/attn.service. It does not enable or start the service unless you set ATTN_START=1.
Environment overrides: ATTN_VERSION=v0.1.0 to pin a tag, ATTN_PREFIX=$HOME/bin for a different install dir, ATTN_SYSTEMD=0 to skip the systemd unit, ATTN_START=1 to enable + start the service immediately, ATTN_SKIP_COMPOSITOR_CHECK=1 to install without a supported compositor.
Verify the binary:
attn --help
attn doctor# flake.nix
{
inputs.attn.url = "github:0xPD33/attn";
inputs.attn.inputs.nixpkgs.follows = "nixpkgs";
outputs = { home-manager, attn, ... }: {
homeConfigurations.you = home-manager.lib.homeManagerConfiguration {
# ...
modules = [
attn.homeManagerModules.default
({ ... }: {
programs.attn = {
enable = true;
daemon.enable = true; # user systemd service
quickshell.enable = true; # install AttnIndicator.qml under ~/.config/quickshell/attn/
};
})
];
};
};
}programs.attn.configText lets you override the default config inline.
programs.attn.quickshell.enable only installs the indicator component. If a separate Home Manager module already owns your entire ~/.config/quickshell tree, leave this disabled and copy quickshell/AttnIndicator.qml, AttnPopup.qml, and AttnRow.qml into that tree manually.
nix develop
cargo build --release
install -m 0755 target/release/attn ~/.local/bin/Or build the flake package directly:
nix build .#default
./result/bin/attn --helpattn init # writes ~/.config/attn/config.toml from the bundled default
attn init --merge # add new bundled defaults to an existing config
attn init --force # overwrite
$EDITOR ~/.config/attn/config.toml
# daemon auto-reloads on save (mtime watch); `attn reload` available as a manual nudgeThe default config covers the common app IDs and domain lists. Want to add a category or domain to the shipped defaults so everyone benefits? The watch lists live in per-category text files (one item per line, # comments allowed):
config/apps/<category>.txt- Linux app IDs / executable namesconfig/domains/<category>.txt- domains for Chromium-family history matching
Edit the relevant file, run tools/sync-default-config.sh to regenerate config/default.toml, and open a PR. CI verifies the regenerated TOML matches the per-category sources.
Non-list runtime config (paths, intervals, browsers, terminals, breaks) lives in config/runtime.toml.
Customize watch lists per category in your own ~/.config/attn/config.toml:
poll_interval_secs = 60
idle_after_secs = 300
socket_path = "$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/attn.sock"
state_path = "~/.local/state/attn/attn.sqlite"
[apps.watch]
coding = ["code", "cursor", "zed"]
terminal = ["com.mitchellh.ghostty", "wezterm"]
chat = ["discord", "signal", "slack"]
[domains.watch]
ai = ["chatgpt.com", "claude.ai", "gemini.google.com"]
scroll = ["reddit.com", "x.com", "tiktok.com"]
video = ["youtube.com", "youtu.be", "twitch.tv"]
[browsers.brave]
app_ids = ["brave-browser", "brave"]
history_paths = ["~/.config/BraveSoftware/Brave-Browser/*/History"]
kind = "chromium"
[terminals]
poll_secs = 10
[terminals.apps]
ai = ["claude", "codex", "aichat"]
editor = ["nvim", "vim", "hx", "helix", "emacs"]See ARCHITECTURE.md for the full data model.
Set programs.attn.daemon.enable = true and Home Manager will register attn.service under your user. Start / stop / check it normally:
systemctl --user status attn
systemctl --user restart attn
journalctl --user -u attn -fattn daemonattn daemon run the long-running collector
attn status --json print current-day status as JSON (used by Quickshell)
attn reload reload ~/.config/attn/config.toml without restarting
attn init [--merge|--force]
write or update the default config
attn doctor check compositor IPC, config parsing, state DB, browser DBs, socket
Example status output:
{
"date": "2026-05-12",
"updated_at": "2026-05-12T22:30:00+02:00",
"watch_seconds": 15563,
"tracked_seconds": 16928,
"apps": [
{ "id": "claude", "seconds": 1094, "watched": true, "category": "ai" },
{ "id": "com.mitchellh.ghostty", "seconds": 5285, "watched": true, "category": "terminal" }
],
"domains": [
{ "domain": "github.com", "seconds": 372, "watched": true, "category": "coding" },
{ "domain": "youtube.com", "seconds": 252, "watched": true, "category": "video" }
],
"categories": [
{ "name": "ai", "seconds": 6979 },
{ "name": "terminal", "seconds": 5285 }
]
}Three QML files under quickshell/:
AttnIndicator.qml: bar chip. Pollsattn status --json(fast initial polls, then every 5 s). Dims when stale, brightens when fresh.AttnPopup.qml: clicking the chip opens a popup with today's totals: a stacked category bar, top items, category filter chips, and side-by-side Apps / Domains lists.AttnRow.qml: list row used by the popup.
If you used programs.attn.quickshell.enable = true, only the indicator is installed. Wire the popup into your own bar manually. The reference wiring lives in the home-manager Quickshell config that owns Bar.qml for this project.
nix develop
cargo test
cargo build --releaseThe test suite covers focus resolution, terminal subprocess detection, browser snapshot reading, domain attribution, idle capping, watch-list classification, and daily-totals rebuild. Tests use in-memory SQLite.
MIT. See LICENSE.