Hyper Focus is a command line tool that watches what you are doing on your computer and prevents you from doing distracting things.

It allows you define what "distracting things" are for you. For example, you might want to prevent yourself from using social media between 9am and 5pm. Or making certain google searches. Or using specific macOS applications. You can define what activities are distracting on a schedule.

In other words, if you are obsessive about personal productivity you can define what you want a productive day to look like and then use Hyper Focus to enforce it.

brew install iloveitaly/tap/hyper-focus

You can then start the service as a daemon:

brew services start iloveitaly/tap/hyper-focus

Or run it directly:

hyper-focus

# you may want to run as root if your scripts are modifying system files, like /etc/hosts
sudo hyper-focus --configuration ~/.config/focus/config.json

When running via a brew service, the logs are located in $(brew --prefix)/var/log/. You can tail the logs:

tail -f $(brew --prefix)/var/log/hyper_focus.log

Or, download a release build and run it manually.

You'll need to grant accessibility permissions to the binary, which you can find via brew which hyper-focus. If scripts you have defined require root access, you'll also need to grant full disk access to the binary as well.

You may want to run Hyper Focus as root. For instance, if you are modifying the /etc/hosts file on wake, you need to run Hyper Focus as root.

Here's how to do it:

sudo brew services start iloveitaly/tap/hyper-focus

hyper-focus --help

OVERVIEW: A daemon process which helps you focus on your work.

USAGE: hyper-focus [--version] [--configuration <configuration>]

OPTIONS:
  --version               Print out the version of the application.
  -c, --configuration <configuration>
                          Path to the configuration file
  -h, --help              Show help information.

• https://marco.org/2015/10/30/automatic-social-discipline
• http://mikebian.co/tag/digital-minimalism/

• Fast, CLI-oriented tool
• UI via Raycast
• Configuration in a simple JSON file (here's an example)
• Very memory efficient, even over long periods of time
• No weird hangs or freezes (Focus app had this issue)
• Run scripts on sleep events (you don't need to rely on the abandoned sleepwatcher tool)
• Treat long periods of no activity as sleep, and execute relevant scripts
• Ability to run as root (if you need to modify system files, like /etc/hosts)

• Run a script on first wake of the day
• Run a script on each wake
• Run script as privileged in order to edit key system files like /etc/hosts
• Treat long periods of no activity as sleep

'First wake' means the first time the computer is woken from sleep for the current day.

Having a first wake script allows you to tie into something like clean browsers and todoist scheduler to setup your workspace and todo list for the day.

• Allow multiple blocking profiles that can be enabled at different times
• Ability to pause any active blocking for a period of time
• Ability to enable blocking for a period of time if no blocking is enabled

• Block macOS applications without quitting them. This is implemented by hiding them when you switch to them.
• "Block" websites by redirecting Chrome and Safari browsers to a page of your choosing when a banned URL is encountered.
• Block hosts
• Block specific URLs, ignoring anchors, and allowing a partial/subset match on query strings.

• Executing scripts for other system states, like other sleep watcher tools. For instance, screen dim/wake or lid close/open.
• Kill/quit applications if they are open. This can be done via a wake script or schedule initialization script (osascript -e 'quit app "App Name"').
• Notification when a new schedule is enabled. You could do this via a schedule initialization script.
• Native macOS application.

Instead of UI, I've opted to a simple HTTP API that can be used to power a Raycast-based UI.

• /reload reload the configuration file
• /pause pause the currently running schedule
• /override force a blocking profile to run for a period of time
• /ping is this thing on?
• /configurations array of names of all blocking profiles. To change the order of the results, change the order of the inputs in your config file.

You can hit the API locally for testing using: http localhost:9029/status

• Run the binary manually swift run
• Copy local config cp ./config.json ~/.config/focus/config.json
• Generate a new release git tag v0.1.3 && git push --tags origin HEAD

Haha! Nope.

This is a fun personal tool. Tests are boring, so I didn't write them.

Plus, writing tests in Swift seems to be a massive pain (no dynamic mocks!).

• https://github.com/qiuosier/SleepTight
• https://heyfocus.com
• https://github.com/ActivityWatch/aw-watcher-window