dalarma is a simple, but powerful cli tool for setting timers, which, after timeout, will block your screen (by default for 15 seconds) to force you to get up from the computer and do some thing.

Imagine you cooking something in oven, and you need to wait for 1 hour until it is done. If you seat at computer, you can very easily miss the time and then your food is crapped. With dalarma you can set timer for 1 hour, which after expiring will block your screen (for 15 seconds), so you have to get up and check oven.

When you do really interesting task and have some experience with such timers, you actually getting training yourself to automatically/mindlessly postpone/skip another one timer alarm, thinking like "ahgh, I'm almost finished this fancy algorithm, let me just done it in 2 minutes and I'll check these oven", which can result in many postpones in a row, so you know what will happen with your food...

• wmctrl (partially optional) - used to make window fullscreen and auto-focus each second to make window harder to close. Hence, it is core functionality, but still, dalarma can work without it.
• st - simple/suckless terminal emulator, used as gui window that blocks screen.
• notify-send (optional) - for sending notifies visible on blocked screen.

AUR package: dalarma-git

Copy ./dalarma somewhere to your $PATH (like ~/.local/bin/ or /usr/bin/) and optionally ./config.example.sh to ~/.config/dalarma/config.sh.

First argument is always the time after which "you need to do something". Format is the same as for sleep, so go to man sleep for details. In short: there is available suffixes like s, m, h for seconds, minutes and hours respectively.

Additionally, first argument time can be set in format hh:mm to set timer ON TIME, not by offset.

All remaining arguments will be used as title for your timer (can be ommited).

dalarma 30m check oven

dalarma 14:20 time to depart

dalarma puts each new timer metadata to /tmp/dalarma/ folder, one per file. File name is pid of timer process, and file itself contains metadata about this timer, such as started_at, sleep_time and title.

There is script that also utilizes fzf for ui. You can take inspiration from it.

~/.config/dalarma/config.sh is just a shell script, so it can be very hackable and extensible.

As interesting feature, you can execute your own commands before and after lock (like mute/unmute all sounds, etc.) with cmd_pre_lock and cmd_post_lock.

You can edit it even after some timers have started and they will use updated config (for example, edit pre and post hooks).

Self-explanatory config example provided.

Spiritual successor of https://github.com/UnkwUsr/UsefulB , which was first inspired by https://github.com/slgobinath/SafeEyes