Shift

Track your working hours from the Noctalia shell: one-click check in / check out, a live daily counter against your contract, and an overtime balance you can adjust. Automation can suggest or do check-ins within your work hours, and asks what to do with the time you were away.

Source code and issues · User guide · Changelog

Plugin

Field	Value
ID	hbollon/shift
Entries	Service: core; bar widget: bar; panel: dashboard; shortcut: tile

Requirements

None of these is required: Shift tracks your time without them, with less automation.

• swayidle (optional): detects when you are away from the keyboard. Without it, Shift still follows the session lock and system sleep, and shows a hint in the dashboard.
• gdbus (optional, from GLib: libglib2.0-bin on Debian and Ubuntu): session lock and sleep detection through systemd-logind.
• loginctl (optional, from systemd or elogind): without gdbus, Shift polls it for the lock state; sleep is still detected when the computer wakes up.

Usage

• Bar widget: add Shift from the bar's Add-widget picker (or configure a widget with type = "hbollon/shift:bar"). It shows your status, today's worked time and a progress ring toward your daily target; hover it for the details.

  • Left click: open the dashboard.
  • Right click: check in, or check out when working.

• Dashboard panel: today's counter and target, the check in / check out button, and three tabs:

  • Today: this week's total, the balance and today's delta, then the day's timeline and sessions;
  • History: a week of bars against the target, or a month calendar; click a day to edit it;
  • Balance: the balance until yesterday and its breakdown, adjustments (time off, corrections), and the tracking start and initial balance.

  The day editor changes a day's sessions (times like 9:30, 930, 9h30 or 9.5), including the start of the running one, and marks days off (no target), ahead of time too. Cards at the top ask about absences, suggestions, days closed automatically and days without sessions: such a day stays out of the balance until you review it (day off, add a session, or not worked). The footer summarises automation, and its details show the signal sources and this week's work hours. Recent actions can be undone for 10 minutes (header button or Ctrl+Z). It opens from the bar widget or the control-center tile, or with:

  noctalia msg panel-toggle hbollon/shift:dashboard
  

• Control-center tile: add Shift from Settings → Control Center shortcuts. Click it to check in or out; right-click it to open the dashboard.

• IPC, for keybinds and scripts:

  noctalia msg plugin hbollon/shift:core all checkin
  noctalia msg plugin hbollon/shift:core all checkout
  noctalia msg plugin hbollon/shift:core all toggle
  noctalia msg plugin hbollon/shift:core all undo
  noctalia msg plugin hbollon/shift:core all resolve keep     # or remove: the oldest absence to review
  noctalia msg plugin hbollon/shift:core all adjust -2:00 Dentist   # a balance adjustment dated today
  noctalia msg plugin hbollon/shift:core all dayoff 2026-12-24 # toggle a day off (today without a date)
  noctalia msg plugin hbollon/shift:core all holidays-refresh # fetch the public holidays again
  noctalia msg plugin hbollon/shift:core all signal idle      # idle, active, lock, unlock, sleep, resume
  

Balance

Your weekly hours are split evenly over your workdays (35 h over Monday–Friday is 7:00 a day). Public holidays and days off have no target; time worked on them is overtime. A change of contract applies from the day you make it, never to past days. The balance counts every day from the tracking start to yesterday, plus the initial balance and the adjustments; today's delta is shown apart until the day ends.

Automation

Automation acts only within your work hours (the window), on your workdays:

• Check in / check out: with the Assisted preset, Shift suggests checking in when you start using your computer within your work hours, and checking out when they end. Automatic does it for you. A manual check-out holds automatic check-ins until the end of the current work-hours period; a session started outside your work hours is never closed by them.
• Absences: when you come back after being inactive, with the screen locked or the computer asleep for at least 15 minutes, Shift asks whether that time was work (a meeting, a call) or should be removed. Removing it splits your session: checked out when you left, checked in when you came back. Shorter breaks count as work.
• End of day: a session still open when the workday ends (at 04:00 by default) is closed at your last activity, and unreviewed absences count as work.

Additional rules add or remove time from the work hours, one per line: + or -, then *, days (mon-fri, sat,sun), a date (2026-12-24) or a date range (2026-12-24..2027-01-02), and an optional time range:

- * 12:00-13:30        lunch break
- fri 16:00-24:00      short Fridays
+ sat 09:00-12:00      Saturday mornings

With Idle detection set to External, send the idle signals yourself, for example from hypridle:

listener {
  timeout = 300
  on-timeout = noctalia msg plugin hbollon/shift:core all signal idle
  on-resume  = noctalia msg plugin hbollon/shift:core all signal active
}

Settings

Setting	Default	Description
Weekly hours	35	Contract hours per week, split evenly over your workdays (35 h over Monday–Friday is 7:00 a day).
Work week	Monday to Friday	Your workdays: Monday–Friday, Monday–Saturday, or a custom set of days.
Workday starts at	4	Advanced. Hour at which a new workday begins; work after midnight and before it counts toward the previous day.
Duration format	7:30	How durations are displayed: 7:30, 7h 30m or 7.50 h.
Automation	Assisted	Manual, Assisted (suggests check-ins and check-outs, asks about absences), Automatic (checks in and out for you, asks about absences) or Custom.
Work hours start / end	08:00 / 19:00	The automation window on your workdays (24:00 allowed as the end).
Not on public holidays	On	Public holidays and days off are outside the work hours.
Additional rules	none	Rules that add or remove time from the work hours (see Automation above).
Check in / Check out	Suggest	Custom only: off, suggest, or automatically.
When inactive / locked / asleep or offline	Ask me	Custom only: count it as work, ask me, remove it, or check out.
Inactive after (minutes)	5	Minutes without input before you count as away.
Shortest absence (minutes)	15	Shorter breaks count as work.
Unreviewed absences	Count them as work	Advanced. What happens at the end of the day to absences you did not review.
Idle detection	Auto	Advanced. Auto (swayidle when installed), swayidle, External (IPC) or Off.
Public holidays	On	No target on public holidays. Fetched from date.nager.at (see Notes).
Holiday country	from your locale	Two-letter country code, such as FR; empty reads it from LC_TIME / LANG.
Holiday region	none	Advanced. A subdivision code for regional holidays, such as FR-67 or DE-BY.
Notify when the daily target is reached	On	Once a day, when your worked time reaches today's target.
Notify about absences to review	On	When you come back from an absence that asks whether it was work.
Notify about suggestions	On	Assisted or Custom: when Shift suggests checking in or out, once per work-hours period.

Each bar widget also has its own settings (middle-click the widget to open them):

Setting	Default	Description
Style	Icon, time and progress ring	Or icon and time, or time only. The ring is hidden on days without a target.
Value	Worked today	Or the time remaining today (overtime shows as +0:23).
When checked out	Dim	Show normally, dim, or hide the widget until the next check-in.

Notes

The core service starts automatically when the plugin is enabled. Shift stores its data as JSON files in ~/.local/state/noctalia/plugins/data/hbollon/shift/ (state.json, balance.json and one ledger/<year>.json per year), plus cached public holidays in holidays/ and generated progress-ring images in cache/. Disabling or removing the plugin never deletes them.

Every workday, Shift copies its data files into backups/daily/<date>/ (the 30 most recent days are kept) and, on the first one of a month, into backups/monthly/<month>/ (12 months kept). If a file is damaged, Shift sets it aside with a .corrupt suffix, restores the newest backup that reads, and tells you its date. To go back to a backup yourself, disable the plugin, copy the files from a backup directory over the ones in the data directory, then enable it again.

Shift's only network access is the public holidays: GET https://date.nager.at/api/v3/PublicHolidays/<year>/<country> for each year from the tracking start to next year, once for past years and at most once a week for the current and next ones. It honors Noctalia's offline mode and uses the cache when offline. Turn Public holidays off to disable it.

Unless automation is set to Manual, the service runs these processes:

• swayidle -w timeout <minutes × 60> 'echo idle' resume 'echo active', for idle detection;
• gdbus monitor --system --dest org.freedesktop.login1, and gdbus call once at startup to find the session and its lock state; or loginctl show-session <id> -p LockedHint every 15 s when gdbus is missing;
• /bin/sh -c 'kill -TERM -- -<pid>' to stop swayidle when its settings change.

Noctalia stops them when the plugin is disabled or reloaded.