Possible to access data about Windows 'Task View'?

[zackgehan]

Windows 11 has a feature called "Task View", which is much like the multiple desktops you can swipe between on macOS. Is it possible to flag activity based on which desktop (or whatever the correct term is) it occurred in?

I have searched for any mention of 'windows task view' with google, and within the AW docs, discord, and github, but found no mention. Apologies if I somehow still missed it, and thank you in advance for any help available! (Also, I wasn't sure whether to flag this as Q&A or feature request, as I don't know 100% that it doesn't exists already.)

[ErikBjare]

Thanks for asking! This is news to me as I have never used Windows 11.

There are similar features on other systems like macOS, various Linux WMs, and some similar concepts in tmux (active session/window/pane). We haven't implemented official support for those either, although I'm sure some people have in their own watchers.

There might never be a good cross-platform implementation of it due to platform/WM differences.

We could add support, but it would take some effort and I'm not entirely sure what the data is useful for (not a great target for categorization rules imo).

What was your intended use of it? Just curiosity?

[zackgehan]

Thank you for your response! Understood, and good to at least know that it doesn't exist, and it's not just me being unable to find it.

The use case is that I just switched from salaried employee to contractor, and was hoping to use this task view/multiple desktops feature with ActivityWatch to calculate my hours worked. It seemed easier/more accurate than trying to parse window titles of apps I use for both work and personal things (firefox, obsidian, occasionally vscode, zotero, chatgpt, so on and so forth) to categorize them as either work or personal time.

Perhaps I'm missing an easier workflow for doing this, though! I just assumed that making sure to swap to my 'self' desktop when not working would be a good solution, but will now rethink/do research on how others manage it.

Thanks again!

[petrroll]

I haven't had time to polish it and currently you can't - regrettably - rule over it due to how the datamodel works :/ but: https://github.com/petrroll/aw-watcher-win-vdesktop

[petrroll]

Also see: https://github.com/orgs/ActivityWatch/discussions/1169