arttime

arttime is a terminal‑based clock and timer that combines functional time‑management with curated ASCII, ANSI, PETSCII and Unicode art. It ships with a collection of more than five hundred text‑art pieces and can display a single line of user‑defined text beneath the artwork, while also supporting animated art that flips between two frames each second. The program runs on macOS, Linux, BSD and Windows WSL, using native desktop notifications and sounds to alert the user when timers expire.

The timer subsystem allows multiple alarms to be set using relative deltas (e.g., 1h 30m) or absolute timestamps, and it supports pattern‑based scheduling for arbitrary repetition schemes such as Pomodoro or custom daily cycles. Users can pause, delay, or loop timers, view elapsed and pending times, switch time zones interactively, and retrieve a history of the last thousand timer sessions. Input can be fed from files, pipes or strings, enabling external programs to drive dynamic displays such as system metrics or weather.

arttime follows the Unix philosophy, offering a lightweight, zero‑dependency core that only requires a shell (zsh on Unix‑like systems). It includes a helper script for consistent art rendering across applications and integrates with fzf for fuzzy art selection when available. The tool is positioned for developers and terminal‑oriented users who want both productivity features and visual flair in a command‑line environment.