pendulum

Update your mattermost status at ease

👷 Background

I work in a pretty big team of engineers (> 60 people) inside a very large office and we use self-hosted mattermost server. Sometimes I am too far away from my colleagues to be called shouting or sometimes they are too lazy to walk for ~ 10 seconds to my desk and check if I am away or not. They keep me asking 'hey, update your mattermost status to let everyone know when you are absent', then I am like 'should I make 4 mouse clicks and type ~ 20 characters for every bathroom breaks or a stretch? no way'. Maybe I am too lazy as well or it isn't too much compared to my habit to wander all across the office too much very often (I normally sit up/down my office chair nearly 40~50 times a day and that's why my nickname is pendulum).

So I have decided to make an automation to help me reduce the fingertips when I am updating my mattermost status. It had to be simple as enough by pressing a few hotkeys, it had to override my screenlock hotkey (Super + L) because there's a strict company policy reads You must lock your screen when you are away. That's the great, historical demand of this small utility.

⚠️ WARNING: Before you dive deeper, I need to warn you this little program was not meant to be production-ready, it was only for my personal use (or my colleagues who loves Ubuntu). It is not well-tested, only tried manual and insufficient testing in focal. It might break in other distros, other environemnts, or it doesn't even run on macOS or Windows. It might be also buggy, and I am not 100% sure about its reliability. Use it at your own risk.

✨ Features

1. Override Super + L hotkey, show app window instead

   

2. Pressing a button updates your mattermost status

   

3. Each status button has a hotkey, so that you can accelerate the screenlock process (e.g Super + L, z to set Sleeping...)

4. Timeout in 5 seconds fallback to general away status BRB soon.

5. Unlock monitor (which needs be started at login and be kept running), which listens to screen unlock event and update the status as Working...

⚠️ WARNING: This project can only be run on Ubuntu Desktop and its subdistros (e.g Pop!_OS). Tested only on focal.

🧱 Prerequisites

1. GNOME shell >=3
2. gjs >=1.64
3. Node.js >=16 (might be able to run on lower versions as well, not tested)
4. Mattermost server >=6 (with API v4) and an account in it ofc

🎉 Getting started

# clone from github
git clone git@github.com:cednore/pendulum.git

# cd into repo directory
cd pendulum

# generate a new dotenv file
cp .env.example .env # customize with your own settings after this

# install npm dependencies
npm install

# start main window
npm start

# start unlock monitor
npm run unlock-monitor

🚚 Installation

1. Git clone this repo somewhere you like it
2. Prepare .env file inside the directory and customize your mattermost server url, username and password
3. npm install inside the directory
4. Override Super + L hotkey with start.sh script
5. Add unlockmonitor.sh to startup application

🚧 Roadmap

• More status presets
• Set expiration of custom status (not found in mattermost api doc, is it possible?)
• Darken rest of the screen except the main screen
• Single JS bundle file by webpack
• Easy installation script, available directly from github
• GitHub action powered release pipeline
• Customizable status presets via json file
• Extend to Slack
• Add markdown badges for Mattermost, GNOME, GJS

📄 License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.

🙇 Credits

• Credit to @mattermost Team for building such a powerful team collaboration app (also made it self-hostable) 🤗
• Special thanks to those behind gjs, you made my life easier 💪
• Thanks to my colleagues, who were too lazy to call me shouting and prefered checking mattermost status for my absence 🦥