Tomato Countdown

A Pomodoro-style tomato timer for Obsidian that keeps a plain-Markdown log of every session, so your focus time, interruptions, and task history stay in your vault instead of a separate app.

Start a 25-minute tomato, get interrupted, log what pulled you away, and watch the day's totals and long-term trends build up — all from a side panel, all stored as text you can read, edit, and search.

Features

• Countdown timer built for note-taking — runs in a side panel next to your notes, with start / resume / interrupt / abandon controls.
• Task-aware sessions — every tomato is tagged with a task name; the 20 most recent task names are suggested in the panel and in the start dialog.
• Interruption logging that doesn't stop the clock — when something distracts you, log the reason and keep focusing. The reason is written into your log.
• Honest tomato quality — tomatoes are rated 🙂 (no interruptions), 🙁 (one interruption), or 🤢 (two or more, or abandoned mid-session).
• Markdown log you own — each finished tomato is prepended to a date-sectioned Markdown file in your vault, newest first.
• Today at a glance — the timer panel shows today's tomato count and quality breakdown.
• Statistics view — Day / Week / Month / Task tabs with a year contribution grid, bar charts, a quality breakdown, and per-task tables.
• Survives restarts — an active session is persisted and keeps counting from real timestamps, not tick counts.
• System notifications — desktop notifications when a tomato finishes or is abandoned.
• Works on desktop and mobile — no Node.js or Electron APIs, so the same build is installable everywhere (isDesktopOnly: false).

Installation

From a release (manual)

1. Download main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from the latest release.
2. Create the folder <your-vault>/.obsidian/plugins/tomato-countdown/.
3. Copy the three files into that folder.
4. In Obsidian, open Settings → Community plugins, reload the plugin list, and enable Tomato Countdown.

With BRAT

1. Install and enable the BRAT plugin.
2. Run BRAT: Add a beta plugin for testing and enter wenjoy/tomato-log-obisidian-plugin.
3. Enable Tomato Countdown in Settings → Community plugins.

Getting started

1. Click the timer icon in the ribbon, or run Tomato Countdown: Open timer from the command palette. The panel opens in the right sidebar.
2. Type a task name (for example write release notes) and press Start.
3. If something interrupts you, press Interrupt and describe what happened. The countdown keeps running.
4. Let the timer reach zero, or press Abandon to stop early and record why.

When the countdown hits zero, the tomato is logged automatically, a system notification fires, and the panel returns to idle.

Interruptions are cheap to log: press Cmd/Ctrl + Enter in the interruption dialog, or Enter in the abandon reason field.

Interrupt, pause, or abandon

Tomato quality is derived from the interruption count at completion: 0 → 🙂, 1 → 🙁, 2+ → 🤢. Abandoned tomatoes are always 🤢.

The Markdown log

Every record is written to the log file configured in settings (default: Tomato Timer Log.md at the vault root). The file is organised by date; a new day's section is created at the top, and each new record is inserted right below its date heading, so the newest record is always first.

# 2026-07-08
#### [13:40-14:05] (🙂🍅, 25m)-write release notes-3
#### [11:02-11:09] (🤢🍅, 7m)-refactor log parser-2
- abandoned: client meeting moved up
#### [09:15-09:40] (🤢🍅, 25m)-refactor log parser-1
- Slack notification
- Email

Each record is a level-4 heading, optionally followed by bullet lines:

#### [<start>-<end>] (<quality>🍅, <minutes>m)-<task name>-<count>

• <start>-<end> — local wall-clock time of the session.
• <quality> — the tomato rating described above.
• <minutes> — minutes actually spent focusing (a completed tomato logs the full duration; an abandoned one logs the elapsed portion, minimum 1 minute).
• <task name> — the normalised task you typed.
• <count> — which tomato this is for that task across the whole log (a running counter, stripped when statistics are computed).

Bullet lines under the heading are the interruptions (and an abandoned: <reason> line for abandoned sessions). A clean tomato has no bullets.

Because the log is plain text, you can edit, reorder, or delete entries; statistics re-read the file on every refresh. Older heading variants written by previous versions — including the form that stored the interruption count inline — are still parsed. Refreshing statistics also removes leftover inline statistics blocks and State buttons written by earlier builds.

Statistics view

Open it with the Statistics button in the timer panel or Tomato Countdown: Open statistics. The view reads the log file and supports four tabs:

Metrics shown for the selected period: tomatoes, interruptions, completed, and abandoned. Click any bar or heatmap cell to switch the period; Refresh re-reads the log.

Settings

Commands

Notifications

Completion and abandonment trigger a system notification through the Web Notifications API, once Obsidian has been granted permission. Completed tomatoes also show a 10-second in-app notice. Logging an interruption does not notify, since the timer keeps running.

System notifications are best-effort: they work in the desktop app, while some mobile builds don't expose the Notification API at all. The in-app notice always works, and the plugin never uses Node.js or Electron APIs, so it installs and runs on mobile.

Data and privacy

• Plugin state (active session, settings, task history) lives in data.json inside the plugin folder.
• Session history lives in the Markdown log file in your vault.
• The plugin makes no network requests and collects no telemetry.

Development

npm install       # install dependencies
npm run dev       # watch mode: rebuilds main.js on change
npm run build     # type-check, then produce a minified production bundle
npm run lint      # lint against the Obsidian plugin guidelines

Source layout:

To test locally, copy main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/tomato-countdown/ and reload the plugin.

Releases are automated: pushing a tag that matches the version in manifest.json runs .github/workflows/release.yml, builds the plugin, and attaches main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css to a GitHub release.

Compatibility

Requires Obsidian 1.7.2 or newer.

Release notes

Version history and notable changes live in CHANGELOG.md.

License

Released under the MIT License. © 2026 wenjoy