I replaced a paid pomodoro app with a 300-line Python script

Reza Ghorbanmeyabadi — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 10:26:11 +0000

Most pomodoro apps gate your own history behind a paywall. Marinara and Focus To-Do (among others) only keep a month of data on the free tier. I wanted to actually analyze months of tracked time, not lose it after four weeks. On top of that, I track dates on the Persian (Jalali) calendar, which none of the existing tools support at all.
So I wrote my own. First pass was a function in a Jupyter notebook logging start/end events to a CSV. It worked, but running a notebook cell every time I wanted to log a task wasn't exactly frictionless for something meant to fire dozens of times a day.
v2 turned it into a real CLI:
pomo start coding
pomo status
pomo end
pomo agg

Each session is one row in a CSV:
uuid, date, weekday, task, start_hour, start_minute, end_hour, end_minute, mins

start appends a row with the end fields blank; end fills them in on that same row. No state kept in memory between commands, since a CLI invocation is a fresh process every time, so the CSV itself is the source of truth for "is anything currently running."
v3 added a calendar toggle, since the Jalali dependency was the whole reason I built this but also the thing that made it useless to most people:
export POMODORO_CALENDAR=gregorian # defaults to jalali

Everything else (data model, commands, aggregation) stays identical regardless of which calendar is active.
Repo's here: GitHub

DEV Community: Reza Ghorbanmeyabadi

I replaced a paid pomodoro app with a 300-line Python script