A focus timer you drive from a terminal.
Type timer 50m break 10m loop 3, press enter, and get back to work.
Why a terminal · Install · What it does · Commands · Shortcuts · How it is built
It is a Pomodoro timer, but the interface is a command line rather than a settings screen, the timer state lives in Rust rather than in the browser, and the window behind it drifts with the season — snow in winter, blossom in spring, falling leaves in autumn — with an ambient loop underneath it.
Free, MIT, no account, no telemetry, nothing leaves your machine. A 5.0 MB installer.
Every timer app puts duration behind a settings panel: open it, find the field, clear it, type, close it. That is four interactions to change one number, and you do it constantly, because 25/5 is a default, not a fit — some work wants fifty minutes and some wants fifteen.
A command line is one interaction:
$ timer 50m break 10m loop 3
Override set:
- Focus: 50m
- Break: 10m
- Sessions: 3
Run `start` to begin session.
$ s
Starting session... [Override: 50m focus, 10m break, 3 sessions]
s starts. p pauses. r stops. The full command set is below, but those
three and timer cover most days.
Grab an installer from releases, or build it yourself.
Needs Rust, Node 20+, and Bun. On Linux you will also
need the Tauri system dependencies — webkit2gtk, and libasound2-dev for
audio.
bun install
bun run tauri build # installers land in src-tauri/target/release/bundle
bun run tauri dev # or run it in developmentThree things it does that other timers do not:
The command line is the interface. Durations, profiles, sound, strict mode and the engine's own state are all reachable by typing, with aliases for the handful you use constantly and a history that survives a restart. There is no settings screen you have to go and find.
Rust owns the clock. The timer is a state machine in Rust and the interface renders what it reports — it keeps no clock of its own, so there is nothing to drift out of step. The tray icon comes from the same state: a ring around the app mark that fills as the session runs, coloured for focus, break, strict mode or idle.
The window keeps you company. The active profile's own icon drifts through the ambience panel — snow falls in winter, blossom in spring, leaves in autumn, sun rises off summer — over one of four seamless ambient loops. It is ordinary DOM and CSS: no video, no sprite sheets, no WebGL.
And the rest:
- A week you can see. The statistics panel keeps a row per day and draws the last seven as bars, scaled against your own best day rather than a target the app invented. Ninety days are kept; nothing leaves the machine.
- Profiles. Four presets, plus as many of your own as you want — duration, season, motion, sound and volume per profile.
- Strict Mode. Start a session that cannot be paused or stopped. Force-closing the app marks it failed.
- Alarms. Three synthesised tones — session end, break end, cycle end. Generated in the app, so nothing is downloaded and they sound the same everywhere.
- Ambient sound. Fireplace, soft rain, light wind, rain on a window. Seamless 45-second Vorbis loops, embedded in the binary.
- Tray and global keys. Runs from the tray, and
Ctrl+Hhides and restores the window from any application.
Ctrl+D switches. The ambience draws in either one — the light theme is not a
stripped-down version of the dark one.
The light theme. The same window, not a stripped-down one. |
Profiles. Duration, season, motion, sound and volume. |
Settings. One drawer, no preferences maze. |
Shortcuts. Eleven of them; two work from anywhere. |
Every screenshot has a twin in the other theme in
docs/screenshots/, which also says what each one is
supposed to show.
Type help in the terminal to open this list in the app, over the console
rather than instead of it.
start Start a session (uses the override if set)
stop Stop the current session
pause Pause
resume Resume
status Current session state
sessions [1-20] Sessions per cycle
Aliases: s and st for start, p for pause, r for stop.
timer 50m Override focus duration
break 10m Override break duration
loop 3 Override session count
override clear Drop the override, return to profile defaults
The three compose into one line in any order, which is the whole argument for
typing at it: timer 50m break 10m loop 3, or break 10m loop 3 to leave the
focus duration alone.
Durations accept 25m, 90s, or a bare number read as minutes. You can also
click the clock itself while it is idle and type into it.
A duration on its own is a one-off — one run, no break after it, no session
counter, and the override retires when it finishes. Add loop 3 and you are
asking for a cycle instead, which you get: three focus runs with breaks between
them.
The four groups below are the reference rather than the pitch, so they are
folded away. help opens the same list inside the app.
Profiles — four presets, plus your own
profile list Show all profiles
profile switch [id] Switch
profile create <name> <focus> <short> <long> <sessions> <season> <intensity> <sound>
profile edit [id] Edit a custom profile
profile duplicate Copy a profile
profile delete [id] Delete a custom profile
Presets are read-only — duplicate one to base your own on it.
Appearance and sound — season, theme, ambience, volume, alarms
season [name] spring | summer | autumn | winter
theme [mode] dark | light | system
ambience on/off Show or hide the drifting particles
sound play | stop Ambient audio
sound volume [0-100]
sound mute
alarm on/off Tones at session, break and cycle end
Discipline — Strict Mode, and binding an intention to a session
strict on No pausing, no stopping, until the session completes
strict off Only while idle
task set "name" --category coding
Diagnostics and the console — statistics, the engine, the history
stats Statistics, and how the last seven days went
reset Restore defaults and clear the statistics
system Host CPU and memory
memory | cpu Narrower views of the same
usage Engine process memory and uptime
engine state Full engine state dump
engine reset Reset the engine
devmode on/off Developer diagnostics
history The commands you have run
history clear Forget them
clear Clear the terminal
help Open the command list, on top of the console
Tab completes, ↑ and ↓ walk the history, and the history is kept next to
your preferences on disk rather than in the window — so it is still there after
a restart.
The same list is in the app, under the keyboard icon in the header. The two marked global work from any application; the rest need the window focused.
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
Ctrl+S |
Start or stop the timer |
Ctrl+P |
Pause or resume |
Ctrl+T |
Toggle the terminal |
Ctrl+, |
Open settings |
Ctrl+H |
Hide or restore the window — global |
Ctrl+D |
Toggle light and dark theme |
Ctrl+B |
Show or hide the ambience — global |
Ctrl+M |
Mute or unmute |
Ctrl+= / Ctrl+- |
Volume up and down |
Ctrl+V |
Toggle the session alarms |
The tray menu carries start, stop, pause, resume, settings and quit, and the tray icon shows the session: a ring around the app mark that fills as the run goes on, violet for focus, green for a break, amber in Strict Mode, and a plain grey outline when nothing is running.
One file, on your machine:
Windows %APPDATA%\ZettaFocus\preferences.json
macOS ~/Library/Application Support/ZettaFocus/preferences.json
Linux ~/.local/share/ZettaFocus/preferences.json
It holds your profiles, theme, volume, statistics, preferences and the console's command history. There is no account, no sync, no analytics, and no network call — the app does not open a socket. To reset it completely, delete that file.
Tauri 2, React 19 and TypeScript on the front, Rust behind it.
The split is deliberate: Rust is the authority on state. AppState holds
the timer, the active profile, sound and strict mode, and every command — typed
into the terminal or clicked in the UI — goes through execute_command and
comes back as a state event the UI renders. The React side owns no timer state
of its own, so there is nothing to drift.
src-tauri/src/
engine.rs EngineState: app state, sound, system probe
state.rs AppState, preference load/save
commands/ timer.rs (the engine + command processing), profile.rs, parser.rs
sound.rs Vorbis playback via rodio
storage.rs preferences.json
tray.rs the tray icon, drawn from the same state
src/
components/ UI, including the ambience in ambient-panel/
hooks/app/ the bridge to Rust — one state subscription, no local clock
Some notes on choices that are not obvious:
- Vorbis, not MP3. Every ambient track loops forever. MP3 carries encoder delay and padding that decode as silence at both ends, so each pass through the loop clicks. Vorbis is gapless.
- 45-second loops. The source recordings ran up to ten and a half minutes at 256 kbps. Since they loop, everything past the loop point is inaudible — and those four files were 42 MB of a 44 MB bundle. See ASSETS.md.
- One persistent
Systemprobe.sysinfo'sSystem::new_all()snapshots every process, disk and network on the machine. Building one every five seconds to read two numbers is both wasteful and wrong — CPU usage is a delta between refreshes, so a freshSystemalways reports zero. - The ambience is text. Each particle is the profile’s emoji in a
div, moved by a CSS transform. A glyph is rasterised into a shared cache once and reused by every particle, where an SVG is a path subtree each and a blurred gradient is a texture — so the cheapest thing to draw is also the one that ties the panel to the profile. - The tray icon is drawn, not shipped. Four PNGs would be four more files to keep in step with the app mark, and the progress arc would need a file per position. It is rasterised from the bundled icon at 32×32, quantised to twenty-four arc positions, and only handed to the OS when it would actually change — so a fifty-minute session repaints the tray two dozen times rather than three thousand.
This repository begins at a single commit. That is deliberate, and I would rather explain it than leave it as a puzzle.
I built the app through the first half of 2026 as a private project, over about eighty commits, and squashed that history when I opened the repository up. Two reasons. It carried 42 MB of the original uncompressed audio in its objects, so every clone would have paid for that forever to fetch files the app no longer uses. And it carried a pile of planning documents describing a paid version of this product that no longer exists, which would have been actively misleading to read.
I am not withholding any of the code. What is here is the whole application, and CHANGELOG.md tracks it from this point on.
See ROADMAP.md — what is coming, and an explicit list of what is not, so nobody spends a weekend on a pull request that gets declined.
MIT — see LICENSE.
The code is MIT. The ambient audio is third-party work under its own terms, documented in ASSETS.md.
Built by Joy Ahmed at ZettaByte — we build the systems businesses run on, and the tools we need in order to build them. This is one of the latter, published because the reasoning in it is worth reading even if the app is not for you.
The rest of what we publish is at zettabyteincorp.com/open-source.