Dannybot is an ancient tradition of my forebears, dating back to the 90s. It used to be a status page on spesh.com, showing where I was, what I was up to, and how much email I was currently failing to answer.

These days, I'm a bit more inward-looking (though apparently just as egocentric). The modern dannybot operates as a little status page for myself on my desktop to show me just how /fantastically/ I'm excelling my own personal goals.

It's written in Nodejs — or more specifically, Electron a pleasant framework that lets you write desktop applications in Javascript.

Hopefully it will also be different in that I will get far enough into it that it will be useful for me. And perhaps for you, if you'd like to fork it and rename it into the YOUR-NAME-HERE-bot.

The number one reason for a dannybot is to demonstrate to me just how much unanswered mail I have in my backlog, and how well I'm doing climbing onto the top of that pile.

Dannybot should extract a bunch of statistics about my current inbox, and displays it in a hopefully visually clear style. It also notes and saves my inbox figures, and shows those older statistics as a recent historical record.

It has an optional systemd service configuration to record these stats even when the main program isn't running.

As a master of meta-procrastination, I have another pile of code that tries to help me manage my todo.txt list. I invoke this handler using the command tnext so I guess that's what we should call it. It lives at https://github.com/dannyob/lifehacking.

Tnext has an API of sorts, which can be used to pull out the current task I'm intending to work on. Tnext shows that. It should also show a little bit of the wider context for my task list, as well as offer some shortcuts for completing a task, timing a pomodoro for the current task, and adding new todos to the sisyphean rockpile.

electron . repl

Will spin up a replify read–eval–print loop running in the context of Electron's main process. Despite what the message says, you should use

rc /tmp/repl/dannybot.sock

... to connect to the REPL. If you don't have replify's rc installed, you can also use netcat or socat.

Dannybot is GPL 3.0. See the license file for more info.

Dannybot contains code from:

• Photon, a UI toolkit for Electron. Copyright @connors. Released under MIT. Full license for Photon.