Ping A Break - A Break Reminder App

PingABreak is a simple reminder tool built for Visual Studio Code that helps you take breaks by tracking your activity and idle time. If you’re spending too long working without a break, this extension will notify you to step away from the screen. It’s customizable, and you can set your own thresholds for how much activity is needed before a break is triggered and how long to consider idle before resetting the timer.

Features

• Activity Tracking: Tracks how much active time you spend working in the editor.
• Idle Time Detection: Detects when you are idle (not interacting with the editor) and keeps track of the idle time.
• Break Reminder: After a set amount of activity time (or once idle for too long), a notification will remind you to take a break.
• Customizable Thresholds: Customize the thresholds for both activity time and idle reset time.

Installation

1. Open VS Code.
2. Go to the Extensions view (press Ctrl+Shift+X).
3. Search for PingABreak.
4. Click Install.

Configuration

PingABreak allows you to customize the following settings:

• pingabreak.idleResetThreshold: The amount of time (in milliseconds) of inactivity before the active time counter is reset.

  • Default: 120000 ms (2 minutes)
  • Description: If you are idle for this amount of time (or more), the active time counter will be reset to 0.

• pingabreak.activityThreshold: The amount of active time (in milliseconds) after which the break reminder will be shown.

  • Default: 600000 ms (10 minutes)
  • Description: Once the accumulated active time exceeds this threshold, you will receive a break reminder to step away from the screen.

Setting Custom Values

To configure the settings, follow these steps:

1. Open Settings (Ctrl + ',' or Cmd + ',' on macOS).

2. Search for the following settings:

   • pingabreak.idleResetThreshold
   • pingabreak.activityThreshold

3. Adjust the values to your preference. For example:

   • Set pingabreak.idleResetThreshold to 6000 if you want 6 seconds of inactivity before resetting the timer.
   • Set pingabreak.activityThreshold to 15000 to get a break reminder after 15 seconds of activity.

Alternatively, you can directly edit the settings.json file:

1. Open the Command Palette (Ctrl+Shift+P or Cmd+Shift+P on macOS).
2. Type Preferences: Open Settings (JSON).
3. Add or modify the following entries:

{
  "pingabreak.idleResetThreshold": 6000,
  "pingabreak.activityThreshold": 15000
}

Usage

Once the extension is installed and configured, it will start tracking your activity and idle time automatically.

Activity Tracking

PingABreak tracks your activity by monitoring interactions in the editor and terminal. It will detect the following user activities:

• Opening or switching documents
• Changing text selection
• Saving files
• Changing editor visible ranges
• Switching or interacting with terminals

Each time you interact with the editor or terminal, the activity timer resets.

Break Reminder

Once the accumulated active time reaches the threshold you have set (pingabreak.activityThreshold), a reminder will appear prompting you to take a break. The default is 10 minutes of activity.

Requirements:

No dependencies required

Release Notes:

First Build Hope it helps you!

0.0.1

Release Notes: Added base setup