How it works

Flowline is an Electron app. The window you see is React. The tracker lives in the main process and writes SQLite through better-sqlite3. This page is the path from a window switch to a row in the dashboard.

Foreground-window tracking

The main process subscribes to Windows foreground-window changes (SetWinEventHook via @paymoapp/active-window) and records an event whenever the active window or its title changes. This is event-driven, not busy-polling, so it stays light on CPU.

Idle & duration heartbeat

A roughly 20-second heartbeat checks idle time (powerMonitor) and flushes the duration of long, switch-free windows. Time spent away from the keyboard is detected as AFK and isn’t counted.

Browser bridge

For browsers, the Flowline Bridge extension pushes the active tab’s URL to the app over a local WebSocket (ws://127.0.0.1:7413). When present, time is attributed to the exact domain. Without it, browser time falls back to window-title heuristics. See Browser extension.

Categorization

Each recorded event is matched against your rules (app, domain, or title) and tagged productive, neutral, or distracting. See Configuration.

Local storage

Everything is stored in a local SQLite database in your user-data folder (%APPDATA%/flowline/flowline.db). Nothing is uploaded. See Privacy.

Project structure

src/
  main/         Electron main process
    tracking/   active-window subscription, idle heartbeat, categorizer
    browser/    local WebSocket bridge for the extension
    db/         SQLite schema, seed rules, queries
    ipc/        typed IPC handlers
  preload/      contextBridge API
  renderer/     React UI (Dashboard, Insights, Rules, Sessions, Settings)
  shared/       shared types, IPC channel names, date-range helpers
browser-extension/   Chrome (MV3) companion extension