It’s been a while since I looked into details of wayland, but one thing I recall is that a lot of things depend on the specific compositor / desktop environment you are using.

X is very open: you can easily query open windows etc, while on wayland things are less standardized / more hidden.

Which compositor do you use?

There’s nothing like you ask. Most time tracker apps are just a calendar where you write manually how much time you spent on something. So you can use something like Kimai, or use a paper calendar and write on it.

But text log of the active window and a screencap, that’s the stuff of Microsoft Recall AI nightmares that Linux developers wouldn’t be keen to implement. What you’re asking is intrusive AI for others. Maybe you need to actually learn to be punctual and write down your activities, or simply, buy a Snapdragon laptop with Windows AI on it. And even then, that info stays with the AI, I don’t think it’s shared much with the user.

No screen captures AFAIK (although it might be doable with a custom watcher), but maybe https://activitywatch.net/ can help.

What’s your window manager?

You can use grim+slurp to take screenshots. Scroll down to the Wayland section for a snippet:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Screen_capture

I keep my desktop muted so I am not sure if it makes a sound or not. If you wrap the commands into a timer loop it will do what you’re looking for.

For the window title you can likely use your window manager’s IPC calls to get the active window title or list of windows on a workspace. My wayland experience is limited to hyprland and if you haven’t found a solution when I get home from work I can post the jank utility I made in rust to output the data I needed for my Eww bar.

maybe:

https://github.com/Svahnen/openrecall_wayland

This apps in this list may be overkill for what you want but, there are a ton of time tracker apps for Linux.

25 Best Free and Open Source Linux GUI Time Tracking Software

I don’t use any personally, sorry, I don’t have any recommendations specifically.

@null_dot
Haven’t ever done this in wayland, but in X, I always used to xdotool to grab the title of the active window. I’d guess you could do the same using one of the wayland alternatives like ydotool, wlrctl, dotool, or whatever else is out there. And something like grim to grab an image of the window.

Chatgt says build a scrip using a few tools. xdotool and scrot. I don’t know if this code is good or not. And some hashes are making markdown headers. How do we paste code on here?

#!/bin/bash

Set interval (in seconds)

INTERVAL=10

Output directories

LOG_FILE=“$HOME/window_log.txt” IMG_DIR=“$HOME/window_snaps” mkdir -p “$IMG_DIR”

while true; do # Get timestamp TS=$(date “+%Y-%m-%d_%H-%M-%S”)

# Get active window title
TITLE=$(xdotool getactivewindow getwindowname 2>/dev/null)

# Fallback if title is empty
if [ -z "$TITLE" ]; then
    TITLE="(No active window)"
fi

# Take screenshot
IMG_FILE="$IMG_DIR/snap_$TS.png"
scrot "$IMG_FILE"

# Log entry
echo "$TS | $TITLE" >> "$LOG_FILE"

# Wait before next iteration
sleep $INTERVAL

done

Look into EMACS and Org-Mode, it can help you do just that.