Screen Time

A quiet screen time tracker for Windows. It runs in the system tray and records only the app in the foreground. If there is no mouse or keyboard input for a period you set, it stops counting.

No account, no server, no telemetry. The data never leaves the machine.

⬇ Download the latest release

Download

The latest release has two builds. Neither needs Python.

File	When to pick it
ScreenTime-<version>-win-x64.exe	A single file: download and run.
ScreenTime-<version>-win-x64.zip	A folder: unzip and run ScreenTime\ScreenTime.exe. Starts faster, and antivirus tools flag it less often.

The app goes straight to the system tray. Click the tray icon to open the window.

The builds are not code-signed, so Windows SmartScreen may warn the first time you run them. Click More info → Run anyway.

To start it with Windows, put a shortcut to ScreenTime.exe in the Startup folder (Win+R → shell:startup).

Features

• Persistent app panel on the left: every tracked app, ranked, with its share and its change against the previous period.
• Intensity heatmap across the whole history, one square per day. A day with no record looks different from a day with zero usage — gaps stay visible instead of quietly inflating your averages. Hover for the value.
• Four periods — today, last 7 days, last 30 days, all time. The selected range is outlined inside the heatmap.
• Categories — browser, development, games, media, tools. Time read as what you were doing, not just which binary was in front.
• Day-of-week profile — which day is actually your heaviest.
• What stands out — plain sentences generated from the data: how the period compares to the one before, which app moved the most, whether one app is eating everything, what is new this period.
• Per-app detail — click any app for its own heatmap, daily trend, active days and busiest day.
• Idle detection — stops counting after a configurable period without input, so a window left open overnight does not become "usage".
• Readable app names — unrealeditor becomes Unreal Engine.
• Dark and light themes, English and Turkish.
• CSV export of the selected period, for spreadsheets or your own charts.

Run from source

Windows and Python 3.9 or newer.

git clone https://github.com/00xSky/ScreenTime.git
cd ScreenTime
pip install -r requirements.txt

Silently, the way the Startup shortcut does it:

wscript run_hidden.vbs

With a console attached, useful while debugging:

python main.py

The window does not open by itself. Click the tray icon to show or hide it; right click for Exit. Closing the window only hides it — tracking continues.

Start with Windows

Put a shortcut to run_hidden.vbs in the Startup folder (Win+R → shell:startup).

Build the exe

pip install pyinstaller
pyinstaller ScreenTime.spec              # single file: dist\ScreenTime.exe
pyinstaller ScreenTime.spec -- --onedir  # folder: dist\ScreenTime\

Data

Where the files live depends on how the app runs:

Run as	Day files	Settings
Release exe	%APPDATA%\ScreenTime\data\	%APPDATA%\ScreenTime\settings.json
From source	data\ in the working folder	settings.json next to the code

One file per day, named DDMMYY.json:

{
  "Edge": 22162,
  "Unrealeditor": 18472,
  "File Explorer": 5241
}

Values are seconds of foreground time. Past days are immutable, so the app reads each one at most once per session and keeps the totals in memory.

Counters are flushed to disk every 60 seconds and on exit, so an unexpected shutdown loses at most a minute.

Settings

Stored in settings.json (see the table above), edited from the gear icon:

Key	Default	Meaning
theme	dark	dark or light
language	en	en or tr
idle_enabled	true	stop counting while there is no input
idle_timeout	60	seconds of no input before idle
hide_system	true	keep shell and search processes out of the list

System processes are always recorded; hide_system only filters the view, so turning it off shows the full picture without losing anything.

Your own app names

The built-in list only names common apps; anything else shows a tidied-up process name under "other". To name and group your own apps, create appnames_local.json:

Run as	Location
Release exe	%APPDATA%\ScreenTime\appnames_local.json
From source	next to the code

{
  "names": {
    "krita": "Krita",
    "obsidian": "Obsidian"
  },
  "categories": {
    "tool": ["krita", "obsidian"]
  }
}

Keys are process names in lower case, without .exe. Both sections are optional; categories are browser, dev, game, media and tool, and unknown ones are ignored. Your entries override the built-in ones. The file is read at startup and is git-ignored, so it is never committed.

Layout

File	Role
main.py	tray icon, main loop, wiring
tracker.py	sampling thread, daily files, aggregation
ui.py	the window
heatmap.py	intensity heatmap, day-of-week profile
charts.py	bar chart, composition bar, scrollbar, tooltip
insights.py	turns the numbers into sentences
theme.py	palette, type scale, spacing
i18n.py	interface strings
appnames.py	process name to display name, categories
settings.py	preference file
paths.py	where data and settings live (exe vs. source)
utils.py	formatting, CSV export
ScreenTime.spec	PyInstaller build
tools/make_icon.py	rebuilds assets/ScreenTime.ico

Known limits

• Measurement is at window level, so a browser is one row. There is no per-site or per-tab breakdown.
• Only the foreground window is counted. A minimized window counts as nothing.
• No intraday detail: a day is a single total per app, with no timestamps.
• Days before idle detection was added were recorded without it, so old and new days are not strictly comparable.

License

Free to use, modify and share, but not to sell.

Screen Time is released under the MIT License with the Commons Clause condition. You may use, copy, modify and redistribute it, at home or at work. You may not sell it, or sell a product or service whose value comes mainly from it. See LICENSE for the full text.

Because of the Commons Clause, Screen Time is source-available rather than open source in the OSI sense.