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Easy Stopwatch and Zeegaree Lite don't seem to be available in Ubuntu.

What timer/stopwatch can I install in Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty Tahr)?

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9 Answers 9

45

Have you tried "stopwatch"?

Terminal install command if you dislike the GUI:

sudo apt-get install stopwatch

It is also easily installable from your Ubuntu software center. You find it by typing stopwatch in the search window. Or if you prefer, you can also find it in the synaptic package manager.

The following link tells you more about it, although it is entirely the same information you'd see if you opened the Ubuntu Software Manager.

https://apps.ubuntu.com/cat/applications/precise/stopwatch/

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  • 12
    If you don't need high precision, beware of stopwatch's CPU usage - around 25% on my machine, compared to 0.3% for gtimer. May 2, 2016 at 9:05
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Gnome Clocks is good and installs easily through the Ubuntu software manager, at least on 18.04, or from the command line through sudo apt install gnome-clocks. It has fairly few dependencies (at least no Gnome Shell required).

It has a stopwatch and a timer, plus world clocks and alarms:

screenshot

https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-clocks/stable/

The online stopwatch and timer is good and easy but seems to take significant cpu in chrome. Gnome Clocks is very low on cpu overhead.

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    One problem I noticed is that it's window is very large, and can't resize it to smaller. Dec 14, 2018 at 16:28
  • good one, was just about to propose the same, I found after a quick research here and on google and then back to the market thing on ubuntu Jun 12, 2019 at 19:17
  • OK, I think I spoke too early about whether or not this one is a good option. It does not seem to ask for much RAM or CPU but then it would turn my fan really loud for no reason, something like playing a very demanding game or similar.. just my 2 cents :) Jun 12, 2019 at 19:41
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A quick search in Synaptic shows a few timers here, gtimer (appears standalone, looks to have several options & timers), stopwatch looks good, gnome-shell-timer (for gnome-shell, probably won't work in Unity), ktimer (has lots of KDE dependencies), xfce4-timer-plugin.

Do any of those look good enough?

In case they're not showing up for you, even after an apt-get update maybe you don't have all the repository components selected (main universe restricted multiverse). See this link for info on Repositories https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Repositories/Ubuntu

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  • on gnome-shell-timer - it does not seem to work in Unity superuser.com/q/538359/162573, as I am in Unity I will not install KDE or Xfce apps, stopwatch does it I guess, in the absence of a better looking alternativve
    – user47206
    Dec 10, 2014 at 8:56
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I used

$ sudo apt install alarm-clock-applet

as a timer for my daughter. Works fine. I tried stopwatch and didn't like it.

Looks like this:

enter image description here

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I couldn't find anything I liked, but a web app seems to be a good contender.

http://www.timer-tab.com/ and also in the Chrome Store.

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Having looked at a bunch of available tea timer packages I settled on the simplest homebaked bash script:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

SND=/usr/share/sounds/gnome/default/alerts/drip.ogg
mplayer "$SND" && notify-send "TEA: $(date +'%A, %d-%B-%y: %Hh %Mm %Ss')"
sleep 50 && mplayer "$SND" && notify-send "Tea: ETA: 50 sec"
sleep 20 && mplayer "$SND" && notify-send "Tea: ETA: 1 min 10 sec"
sleep 20 && mplayer "$SND" && notify-send "Tea: ETA: 1 min 30 sec"
sleep 30 && mplayer "$SND" && notify-send "Tea: ETA: 2 min"
sleep 180 && mplayer "$SND" && notify-send "Tea: ETA: 5 min"

Keep in mind that Ubuntu might suppress the notifications for example when a video is playing or the flash player is active. For cases like this append --urgency=critical at the end of the notify-send command.

It shows a notification at specified intervals and emits a sound via mplayer. Adjust to meet your needs.


On older desktop versions it was possible to use zenity to show an icon in the notification area with hoverable elapsed time, but under Gnome3 and current versions of Unity zenity notification icons don't work anymore.

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  • Nice, I'm using this with the play command from the sox package instead of mplayer. You should exchange the order of the notify-send/mplayer commands so that the sound and notification both appear at the same time, specially if the sound file is not really short. Jan 19, 2020 at 19:43
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    The answer is from a while back, and I stopped using mplayer (in favor of mpv). In fact you can as well use aplay (comes with alsa) or paplay (comes with pulseaudio) — both will have much less overhead than mplayer/mpv.
    – ccpizza
    Jan 19, 2020 at 19:47
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Both Zeegaree Lite and Zeegaree are now available at github. The reason why they are no longer in USC is explained here: https://web.archive.org/web/20190406121732/http://zeegaree.com/2014/10/zeegaree-and-zeegaree-lite-no-longer-available-in-ubuntu-software-center/

Zeegaree Lite at github Zeegaree at github

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  • I'm sorry but I've finally decided to stop paying for zeegaree domain and hosting.
    – mivoligo
    Mar 9, 2020 at 9:51
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If you need something super quick and simple, try

time read

which gives you the wall clock time from when you run the command to when you press the ENTER key again. (The read command reads a line of input from STDIN.)

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Try gnome-shell-timer

You can install it in the terminal with the following line:

sudo apt-get install gnome-shell-timer

Includes preconfiguration options, alerts, and an icon in the top gnome shell panel.

If you are are currently in Unity shell, log out, then click the icon next to your username. From the dropdown, select Gnome shell. Log in and follow the directions above.

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  • superuser.com/q/538359/162573
    – user47206
    Dec 10, 2014 at 8:58
  • @cipricus If you are using Unity, log out to switch to Gnome. Dec 10, 2014 at 9:17
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    Thank you, but I will not install a desktop environment just to get a small stopwatch app anyway. (I should install the gnome desktop first. I do not have other session available except Unity and I do not want one.) I have edited the question to make it Unity only.
    – user47206
    Dec 10, 2014 at 10:20

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