Note that you can customize the look of the main window in the preferences dialog (see The Preferences Dialog, section 3.1), so not all these areas might show up after you have played around with GTimeTracker a bit. You can allways enable missing areas in the preferences dialog.
Nearly all menu items in GTimeTracker have a shortcut (or accelerator
key). Those key sequences are shown behind the name of the function. If for
example you want to activate the function New Project...
from the
File
menu, you can just hold down the Control
key and press the
N
key. In the menu this is shown as Ctl+N
.
The menu bar consists of four menus: File
, Edit
, Timer
and
Help
. I will describe these menus in the following sections.
File
Menu
File
menu you will find the functions dealing with the
configuration file -- $HOME/.gtimetrackerrc
. In addition
there is a function to quit GTimeTracker. I have also put the New
Project...
funtion there. This is mainly because nearly all software has a
new function in the File
menu and that's the place I would search
for it.
New Project...
Reload
and Save Configuration File
Reload Configuration File
and Save Configuration
File
.
The configuration file will be saved every time, GTimeTracker exits. I have made some effort, to verify that this file will be updated even in case of program aborts. So there should be no need to save the configuration file for safety purpose. But you might want to rearrange your projects a bit. You may want to save the current state of the projects just to make sure you cannot delete a project by accident.
In case you made some mistakes you can then use the Reload
Configuration File
function. You will be asked, if you really want to
discard your current set of projects. Just press OK
, if you really ment
to reload the old configuration file. If you activated this function by
accident, you can press Cancel
.
Quit
Edit
Menu
Edit
menu holds all the functions to edit the project list.
In addition there is a menu item to activate the preferences dialog.
Cut
, Copy
and Paste
Cut
to remove projects from the list. But these cutted projects aren't
discarted right away. You can use Paste
to insert a cutted or
copied project either before the current selected project, or, if no
project is selected, at the bottom of your project list. The Copy
function does the same as the Cut
function, but will not remove the
project from the list.
Note that there is only room for one project to be cutted or copied. If you cut or copy another project, before pasting the previous one, that project will be lost forever.
On the other hand it is possible to paste a cutted or copied project multiple times.
Properties...
Preferences...
Timer
Menu
Timer
menu lets you start and stop the internal timer (see The Internal Timer, section 4.1 and The State of a Project, subsection 2.3.2).
You can start the timer by activating Start
. Stop
will stop the
timer. And you can toggle the state of the timer with Timer running
.
Help
Menu
Help
menu is About...
. This function
will popup the about dialog. Just press Close
to get rid of it...
The initial state of the toolbar shows icons for the following functions from left to right:
E.g. there is the timer (see The Internal Timer, section 4.1). The time of a selected project will only be counted, when the timer is running. This gives us a third state of a project. Here is a list of states and what happens to a project in each state:
This might be confusing the first time, but you can benefit from this.
E.g. I use the shell command (see Shell Commands, subsection 3.1.2) to update my
.project
file. When I'm not really working on a project (e.g. because
I'm just away to get me a new coffee or something), I can leave the
.project
file alone, but don't have to count the time.
You can select a project by clicking on it with the left mouse button. Pressing the left mouse button again on a selected project deselects it. This is the way to mark all projects as unselected.
To get a popup menu for a project, you have to press and hold the right
mouse button on it. If the project wasn't selected, it will now receive the
selection, and the popup menu will be displayed. The popup menu consists of
the menu items of the Edit
menu, which deal with projects. Thus it is
just a replacement for selecting a project and then using the Edit
menu.
The status bar helps to have a better info about the state of a project I was blabbering about in The State of a Project, subsection 2.3.2. You know exactly if there is currently no selected project, even if the internal timer is running (which is reflected by the icon in the Start/Stop Timer toolbar item).