A macOS CLI daemon that monitors your typing rhythm and nudges you when your pace signals you're rushing. The goal is to support sustainable focus and healthy workflow patterns.

It monitors your keystrokes locally (nothing leaves your machine!), classifies your typing state every two seconds, fires a macOS notification when you've been in a rushing state for too long, and shows a live emoji in your menu bar with the status of the application.

Note that for above demo in the GIF the nudge fires earlier than in the default configuration.

States:

• ⚪ Idle — no recent typing
• 🔵 Passive — low activity or irregular rhythm
• 🟡 Normal — active, correction rate within range
• 🔴 Rushing — high correction rate sustained

The primary driver for the Rushing state is the correction rate. See src/classifier.rs for the full classification logic.

Why

I built this to explore Rust and macOS native development, creating a lightweight CLI tool that provides awareness of my workflow patterns. This is by no means a perfect tool and/or perfect code, but it was a fun way to get acquinted with these new technologies :)

Privacy & Security

pace-coach runs entirely local on your machine. It never records, stores, or transmits the content of your keystrokes: only the timing intervals between keypresses are held in memory, and only long enough to compute the current pace metrics (2s). Once a classification cycle completes this data is discarded.

The macOS Input Monitoring permission is required to detect keypress events system-wide. The daemon runs as a launchd Launch Agent under its own identity (/usr/local/bin/pace-coach). Therefore, the permission is granted to pace-coach specifically instead of your terminal app. This is done on purpose to ensure the permission's scope is as limited as possible.

Install

The following script downloads the latest release, extracts both binaries, and puts them in /usr/local/bin. Please ensure that /usr/local/bin is available on your $PATH.

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/job-almekinders/pace-coach/main/install.sh | sh

Requires Apple Silicon (arm64). The script downloads both binaries, installs them to /usr/local/bin, signs the daemon, and registers it as a Launch Agent.

Run pace-coach start to launch. macOS will ask for Input Monitoring permission on first start. It should be granted to pace-coach, not to your terminal app.

To uninstall: curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/job-almekinders/pace-coach/main/uninstall.sh | sh

Usage

pace-coach start             # start daemon + menu bar icon
pace-coach stop              # stop both
pace-coach status            # NORMAL 🟡
pace-coach status --verbose  # full metrics
pace-coach config show       # print current config

Configuration

Edit ~/.pace-coach/config.json then restart the daemon:

{
  "correction_rate_threshold": 0.06,
  "stress_duration_secs": 10,
  "nudge_cooldown_secs": 60
}

Logs

~/.pace-coach/pace-coach.log — daemon stderr. Useful for debugging.

Build from source

Requires Rust stable (rustup.rs) and Xcode Command Line Tools (xcode-select --install).

Install or uninstall both binaries locally:

make install   # build, sign, register Launch Agent — then run 'pace-coach start'
make uninstall # stop daemon and remove everything

Build release binaries only (no install):

make build
# binaries at target/release/pace-coach and target/release/pace-coach-menubar

License

MIT

Contributions

Contributions for fixes or feature additions are welcome! Feature additions I can foresee for this project are:

• A more user friendly installation method, such that non-technical users can also use pace-coach.
• A more user friendly method to call the CLI commands e.g. via the symbol in the menu bar.
• Validate and improve the classifier algorithm.