Which Time Tracker application do you recommend?

I have to do three or four jobs a day, and each has several parts. I want a time tracker tool to help me know how much time I've spent on each part and each job overall.

I've found some like gnotime and hamster.

What application do you recommend for such a case?

Hamster

Main app: hamster-applet

Appindicator: hamster-indicator

I've grown fond of Hamster, and used it for tracking how long I worked on a Summer of Code project. It's added to your indicator menus (or systray). When you want to start/stop/change tasks, just hit Super+H and type what you are doing.

It makes some pretty nice statistics for you that can be exported as HTML, for sending to others. You can categorize parts of a job into groups to keep track of what exactly you're doing at the time.

Each task is labelled as [task]@[job]. For example, you could have dev@project, doc@project, etc. Hamster will do some auto-completion on these as well so most of the time you only need to type a few characters. Tags can be added to tasks as well for further categorization.

Screenshot by Toms Bauģis

Have you tried toggl

Its an online app but it has a native linux client

I use gtimelog.

Well. I wrote gtimelog. So it works for me. YMMV. I'm not the best software maintainer, I'm afraid.

I recommend Emacs with Org-Mode, installed by default together with emacs. Here is a screenshot of a Org-Mode buffer:

Why Emacs + Org-Mode? to avoid context switch, keeping you in the flow state!!! Sounds a bit radical, right?, I know, but I realized that -- in practice!

When I give Org-Mode a chance I completely abandoned my old way of work and started keep me more focus on what really matter (code). My old workflow was:

• Stop code and go mark as done some items;
• Switch to the opened browser, looking for the remember the milk opened TAB;
• Check my TODO tasks for that day and check OUT done items;
• go back to my editor;
• finally, restart the work (may take some more minutes to deeply focus again).

With Org-Mode, I just need to switch to the Org-Mode buffer, pressing Ctrl + x b, and mark items as DONE -- switching back to my previous buffer. No more browser (or external app) + editor.

I also would like to suggest to adopt The Pomodoro Technique, a really simple technique to get the most out of time management. Its more simple then GTD and easy to use in Emacs + Org-Mode: Put a timer of 25 minutes in all your tasks and Org-Mode will alert you always a task end. Better then ever!