What is vigil?

Vigil is a desktop app for tracking how you spend your time on your computer, built for people who want a productivity tracker that never sends their data to someone else's server. Everything it records lives in a single local database file on your own machine, and nothing leaves your computer unless you turn on an optional AI feature yourself. Once running, Vigil quietly watches which app or window is focused every couple of seconds and logs that as a session, detecting when you go idle or take a break without you having to press start or stop. It calculates a focus score for how deep your day was, supports timed pomodoro style focus sessions that gently block distracting apps for the duration, and lets you set goals like capping distracting app time to under thirty minutes a day, tracking a streak for staying under it. On the data side, it shows your day, week, month, and year of activity through timelines, bar charts, heatmaps, and a graph view showing how your attention moves between different apps over time. You can export any of this as a clean shareable image, or as a raw CSV or JSON file, or back up the whole database in one click. It also includes some gentler control features, like scheduled app blocking that never kills a process, shared reminders and to do lists, a small floating widget showing your current state, and global keyboard shortcuts. For more technical users, there is an optional local API and a connector for AI assistants like Claude that can read your stats and manage reminders on your behalf, plus an opt in feature that sends only aggregate numbers to an AI provider of your choice using your own API key. It is built with Electron, React, and TypeScript, runs on Windows and Mac, and is fully open source under the MIT license.