Harv — Time tracking that lives in your terminal

I’ve been using Harvest, the time-tracking tool, for years, and every time I reach for the browser to start a timer, a small part of me dies inside. So I decided to fix that — properly this time.

Say hello to Harv.

$ harv

That’s it. No subcommand, no flags. Just harv — and you’re in a full-screen terminal dashboard with your timesheet, running timers, and a keyboard shortcut for everything.

The terminal is your happy place

I live in the terminal. My editor, my git, my builds, my deploys — everything happens behind a blinking cursor. The one thing that kept pulling me out? Starting a timer in Harvest.

Browser tab. Click project dropdown. Scroll through 40 projects. Click task. Click start. Every. Single. Time.

Harv replaces all of that with muscle memory:

No mouse. No loading spinners. Just keystrokes.

Power features for power users

Harv goes well beyond a simple start/stop timer:

Aliases. Create shortcuts for frequently-used project/task combos. Instead of picking “Client X → Development” from a list every morning, just type:

$ harv start dev

Project config files. Drop a harv.toml in your project root and Harv knows which project and task to pre-select. Define note templates that pull from git — branch names, commit messages, your Harvest user name:

[templates.standup]
pattern = "Daily standup — {branch_name} — {commit_message}"

Automatic dark/light mode. Harv detects your OS theme in real time. Switch to dark mode at sunset? Harv follows along without missing a beat. Two full color palettes, instant switching.

Six languages. English, Dutch, French, German, Spanish, Italian. Auto-detected from your system locale, or set it explicitly. Every label, every error message, every CLI prompt — translated and locale-aware.

Built-in update notifications. When a new release drops on GitHub, Harv tells you right in the TUI top bar. Because checking for updates manually is a web browser problem — and we’re not doing that anymore.

Yes, I vibe-coded it. Yes, it’s production quality.

Harv is my first Rust project aimed at real daily use. I’ve been writing PHP and TypeScript for a decade. Rust was a language I understood conceptually but had never shipped with.

So I did what any reasonable developer does in 2026: I paired with AI agents. Not to write the code for me — but to keep me honest. Every change goes through a pipeline:

$ cargo fmt --all -- --check    # Formatting
$ cargo clippy -- -D warnings   # Zero warnings allowed
$ cargo test --workspace        # All tests must pass

No exceptions. The CI enforces this on every push. The result: 521 passing tests, zero clippy warnings, 5-platform cross-compilation, and a codebase where 70% of the lines are test code.

This quality-first pipeline is what makes AI-assisted development sustainable. The AI generates, the linter catches, the tests verify, and I make the architectural calls. It’s not “AI writes code” — it’s “AI accelerates, quality gates protect.”

The project ships as a single binary. No runtime, no dependencies to install. Cross-compiled for Linux, macOS, and Windows — both x86_64 and ARM64.

Try it in 30 seconds

# Install
cargo install --git https://github.com/josbeir/harv harv-cli

# Connect your Harvest account (opens browser once)
harv connect

# You're in
harv

Prefer binaries? Grab one from GitHub Releases. Shell completions for bash, zsh, and fish are built in:

source <(harv completion zsh)

What I actually learned

Rust was on my radar for years. I’d read the book, followed the blogs, admired the ecosystem. But shipping a Rust project teaches you things no tutorial can:

• The borrow checker stops being an adversary and starts being a teammate
• Pattern matching and algebraic types make state machines trivial
• cargo doc --open is the best documentation experience in any language I’ve used
• Cross-compilation for five platforms from a single Cargo.toml still feels like magic
• The testing culture is contagious — when writing tests is this frictionless, you just do it

Harv didn’t teach me Rust from scratch. It took my theoretical understanding and made it operational. There’s a difference between knowing what a Mutex is and debugging a poisoned one in CI at 11 PM.

It’s yours

Harv is MIT-licensed and on GitHub. Stars, issues, and pull requests are welcome. If you use Harvest and live in the terminal, give it a shot.

Because the only thing better than time tracking is time tracking you don’t have to think about.

$ harv