Glyph Time

See where your hours go. A quiet count-up on the edge of your screen, a nudge every 30 minutes, every session saved to your vault as plain files.

Its page is glyph.fru.dev/time. Part of the Glyph family by fru.dev: Glyph Studio, Glyph Jot, Glyph Ibis and Glyph Rig, plus the tools Glyph Arena, Glyph Cast and Glyph Time.

Install

Download Glyph-Time.dmg and drag Glyph Time to Applications. It is signed and notarized by Apple. Needs macOS 26 on Apple silicon. It lives in the menu bar and on the right edge of the screen; there is no Dock icon.

Use

• Start from the clock on the right edge (hover it), the menu bar, or Control-Option-T from anywhere. The same keys pause and resume. Nothing ever takes the focus from the app you are in.
• The clock rests as a small count with a dot: green while it runs, a hollow ring while paused. Hover it for the project, the time and three controls: pause or resume, stop, more.
• Projects are optional. Unnamed, a session takes the repo or folder of the terminal or editor in front (with Accessibility allowed), else the app's name, shown dimmed as a guess. Name it any time from the clock's More menu or the menu bar.
• Nudges: every 30 minutes (Settings: 15 to 90, or never) the clock slides out with "1 h on acme-api" and two answers, Keep going or Stop. Left alone it fades back after 8 seconds, and the next one is skipped.
• Count down 15, 25, 50 or 90 minutes from More or the menu bar. At zero it says so and keeps counting the time over (+3:12) until you stop.
• Away: five minutes without a key or the pointer (Settings: 2 to 15, or never), the screen locked or the Mac asleep pause the clock, dated when you left. Back within 30 minutes, it carries on; longer, the session ends when you left. A pause you made yourself stays until you resume.
• Today: the menu bar lists today's projects and their time, from every device. Click one to start again.
• Recent: with nothing running, the open clock and the menu bar list your last five projects, with today's and the total time. A click starts a new session on one, never reopens the old. Right-click one on the clock (or hold Option in the menu) to hide it from Recent; it keeps its sessions, is listed under Hidden (menu bar, Settings) and comes back when you start it again. Hiding is a line in the session file, so every device agrees.

Where sessions go

One line per start, pause, resume, name, nudge, stop, hide and show, appended to <folder>/<YYYY-MM>.<device>.jsonl. Each device writes only its own file, so a folder synced between Macs never conflicts; readers merge the files by time. The file is the timer: quit, crash or restart and the clock picks up where the lines say.

{"device":"Laptop","event":"start","host":"laptop-local","project":"acme-api","source":"repo","ts":"2026-10-27T09:12:04-05:00"}
{"event":"pause","host":"laptop-local","reason":"idle","ts":"2026-10-27T09:40:00-05:00"}
{"event":"resume","host":"laptop-local","ts":"2026-10-27T09:43:10-05:00"}
{"answer":"keep","event":"nudge","host":"laptop-local","minutes":30,"ts":"2026-10-27T09:45:14-05:00"}
{"event":"stop","host":"laptop-local","minutes":85,"ts":"2026-10-27T10:40:12-05:00"}

Only the project name and the front app's bundle id are kept: never a window title, a URL or anything you typed. Choose the folder in Settings:

• a Glyph Studio vault: sessions in data/apps/time/sessions/, and a short Markdown summary (today, this week, last week by project, this week by device) at data/domains/time/source/apps/time/summary.md, where Studio and your agents read it;
• any other folder: .glyph-time/sessions/ inside it;
• none: ~/Library/Application Support/Glyph Time/sessions/.

Build

./scripts/build.sh --install     # builds "Glyph Time.app" with SwiftPM (no Xcode), copies it to /Applications

The session format is TimeLog in GlyphCore's GlyphVault (Packages/GlyphCore), shared with every Glyph app that records time.

Test

cat Packages/GlyphCore/Sources/GlyphVault/TimeLog.swift TimeLogCheck.swift | swift -   # the format
./scripts/ui-check.sh <out dir>                                                           # the app

The UI check runs the real app twice (a plain folder, then a stand-in vault). It clicks the edge clock's own buttons with mouse events sent to its panel, reads the session file after every step, and saves a picture of each state in <out dir>: start, pause, resume, naming, nudges (answered, ignored, the next one skipped), a countdown to zero and past it, idle within and past 30 minutes, screen lock, sleep and wake, a session left open in the file, no burst of nudges on launch, the menu bar's items, the shortcut, hiding the clock, Settings, and the summary. Nudges, countdowns and idle run on a fast clock. It needs no permission.

How it is built

Swift and SwiftUI, one small package. A non-activating NSPanel on every Space and over full-screen apps for the clock, NSStatusItem for the menu bar, Carbon's hotkey (no Accessibility needed for it), CGEventSource for idle time.

File	What it does
Clock.swift	the timer: every action appends a line; the open session is folded back from the file
Edge.swift	the clock on the screen's edge: tab, count, open card, nudge
Watch.swift	sleep, lock and idle; the project guess from the front window
App.swift	launch, menu bar, the name prompt, the shortcut
Store.swift	where the files go, and the vault summary
SettingsView.swift, UITest.swift	settings, and the UI check above

Versions

• 0.1.7 (2026-10-27): Recent projects. The open clock lists your last five projects under Start, the menu bar too (plus All Projects and Hidden); a click starts a new session on one, and the name prompt suggests every project as you type. Right-click (or Option in the menu) hides one; Settings can hide projects untouched for 30 days.
• 0.1.6 (2026-10-27): dragging the open clock no longer folds it mid-drag.
• 0.1.5 (2026-10-27): put the clock anywhere on the screen: it stays exactly where you drop it, never under the menu bar or the Dock. Keep it open while a session runs, or minimize it to the icon and time: the button at its top right, Keep Clock Open in the menu bar, or Control Option M.
• 0.1.4 (2026-10-27): Glyph Time is in the Dock as well as the menu bar. Settings can hide either one (never both). A click on the Dock icon opens the clock; a second click opens Settings.
• 0.1.3 (2026-10-27): the clock is redesigned: one column, even spacing, and the Glyph Time icon at the edge when closed, with a green ring while it runs. Drag it to either edge; it remembers where. Double-click or Reset Clock Position puts it back.
• 0.1.2 (2026-10-27): branded. The runner in the menu bar and at the top of the clock, office green for the running state, the main control and a line filling toward the next nudge (a ring on the small count), a green tab when idle, light and dark panels, the icon and name atop the menu and Settings.
• 0.1.1 (2026-10-27): the Glyph Time icon is now the runner: the family figure mid-stride with a stopwatch for a head, chosen for the family. Nothing else changed.
• 0.1.0 (2026-10-27): first release. The edge clock, nudges, countdowns, idle, lock and sleep, projects guessed from the front repo, the menu bar with today's projects, sessions as plain files and a summary for Glyph Studio.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.

On the iPhone

Glyph Time for the iPhone is its own app (since 2026-10-27; it was a Time area in the Glyph iPhone app). It opens on the timer and writes the same lines, in its own <YYYY-MM>.iphone-<model>.jsonl, sent whole over your private network into the same sessions folder. This app merges every file there, so phone sessions show in Today and in the summary. Alarm and reminder lines are kept but not folded into sessions.