There are lots of anti-rsi packages out there for windows. I even found a few for Linux. None did what I wanted them to do: to enforce short and long breaks at configurable intervals, allowing me to push them back when I was in the middle of something, but getting increasingly insistent that I actually took them.

Enter anti-rsi, a python script which does everything an anti-rsi package needs to do and nothing more. It can be paused, resumed, postponed, and forced to run early. It uses some idleprinter (xprintidle) to keep track of when the computer isn’t in use and pause itself. It logs the total time it considers that the system has been in use. Communication is by unix signals, which is a bit naughty, but I found enough. It will output usage when sigpolled to /dev/shm/usage, which I then pickup with a wrapper script for i3status. It also logs, and I run a few services to conglomerate all these logs onto the main workstation and generate a nice pretty graph of them with the wonderful mlpd3 which ‘brings matplotlib to the browser’.

There are many possible improvements, but I wrote this a few years ago and it’s been in use ever since.