I use the Pomodoro Technique a lot when I'm at home. I find it really useful to not only make sure I get stuff done, but to make sure I take regular breaks and get other stuff done, like housework and exercise.
I used to use a 25 minute timer on my digital watch, which kinda died this weekend. There are Android apps, but I find they're not as immediate and don't work as well. I realised I needed a timer that would run in a terminal, since I spend so much time there anyway.
I found this script with Google. I put it in pomo.sh and did a chmod u+x on it.
There were a couple of problems - first you might notice there are a couple of HTML aliases in there, so I needed to replace them with their symbols > and &.
Second problem came when I added it as an alias to my .bashrc:
alias pomo='sh ~/pomo.sh 25 "Pomodoro" "Pomodoro started, you have 25
minutes left" "Pomodoro ended. Please stop the work and take short break"'
Apparently Ubuntu uses Dash instead of Bash when using sh so I was getting this error after the first minute:
pomo.sh: let: not found
The solution was to specify that Bash be used:
alias pomo='bash ~/pomo.sh 25 "Pomodoro" "Pomodoro started, you have 25
minutes left" "Pomodoro ended. Please stop the work and take short break"'
So now I type pomo into a terminal and get a 25 minute timer, complete with notify-send notifications, which look particularly pretty in my Awesome theme I adjusted the display time of these to my liking.
Roll on the productivity.