Activity Screen: filtering and dynamic rule creation

Features
#1

Why can’t I just click or tap on any of the high level categories or applications or anything else on the activities page to have it drill down into that filter view? IE if I click on the chrome.exe tab under “top applications” or “Uncategorized” under “top categories”, why doesn’t the whole page filter out anything that isn’t part of that data group? Also being able to filter by Application as you can with Category would be useful.

Also it would be really nice to be able to create rules on the fly from the activity screen, based on a piece of data that you filtered down to. So you can easily create rules for some of your uncategorized things.

#2

Filtering already exists in the master branch for categories.

It’s very useful for finding out what is in the category “Uncategorized” so you can add that to your categories and get a lower percentage of uncategorized events.

Unfortunately that’s only for categories and currently it’s a dropdown menu so maybe not as user friendly, your suggestion of just pressing it is probably a better idea. The ability to filter by appname is also a good idea.

Will take this into consideration.

#3

Also if you click on anything on the activity screen, the sunburst graphic should alter (change color, fade all other to grey, or explode to provide separation between) to highlight the specific item you have selected.

1 Like
#4

Would prefer to have a more user-friendly way to define your own categories. The current approach is too cumbersome. RegEx is very mighty, but the initial adding process should be much simpler in order to be used frequently by new users, especially the non-tech-savvy ones.

Adding them from the activities screen by clicking or dragging them would be the way to go.

Should we create a separate feature request for that or is this already on your to-do list? BTW, do you offer a roadmap, where we can see your next actions?

#5

It’s not as simple as that. The issue if you click or drag something is that the only thing you are dragging is a window title and/or an appname, so then we would have to also ask the user “did you want to create a category from the title or the appname?” and on top of that also ask “Did you mean the whole title/appname or only a part of it?”. We can’t know what the user is thinking and just dragging something doesn’t give us enough context to work with and might in turn break previously created categories.

We definitely need to add more user-friendly ways though, I wholeheartedly agree. We just wanted the ground work out early so those who need the features and are more experienced can try it out early and help out finding bugs.

A separate feature request would be better.

Regarding out roadmap will publish a new developer update soon!

#6

We do actually, @xylix has been getting this GitHub projects board up-to-date. It should contain most things: https://github.com/orgs/ActivityWatch/projects/2

Which reminds me, we probably want to post about it somewhere public (like the README and CONTRIBUTING) so people will find it.