A dead-simple Pomodoro timer that floats over everything else.
Why "Goldfish"?
Because of my goldfish-brained ADHD. The whole point of this app is that the timer is always on top of every other app - out of sight is out of mind, so it stays in your face no matter what you're doing. A timer you have to go looking for is a timer you forget about ten seconds after starting it.
Principles
- Stay on top. The overlay floats above other (windowed) apps and doesn't disappear when you switch away. It dims to the background when you're not interacting with it, and goes solid when you click it.
- Stay simple. No accounts, no stats, no streaks, no shame ledger. It is present-tense by design - it only knows now. There's nothing to configure before you can start; just click "Start focus".
What it does
A classic Pomodoro cycle, shown as a phase label, four progress dots, and a monospace countdown:
- Four focus blocks, each followed by a short break, with a longer break after the fourth - then it repeats.
- The card and the menu-bar dot are colour-coded by phase: tomato for focus, green/teal for breaks, amber when idle.
- At
0:00it chimes and advances on its own. You can switch either hand-off to a manual "wait for me" with Auto-start breaks / Auto-start focus.
It runs as a menu-bar agent (no Dock icon). All control lives in the menu - click the menu-bar dot, or right-click the overlay itself:
| Action | |
|---|---|
| Start focus / Take a break | move through the cycle |
| Pause / Resume | freeze the clock |
| Abandon | drop the current focus block (doesn't count) |
| Reset | end the whole cycle |
| Auto-start breaks / focus | toggle the automatic hand-offs |
Drag the overlay anywhere; it remembers where you put it.
Configuration
Durations, window position, and the auto-start toggles are saved to a small,
hand-editable TOML file at $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/goldfish/config.toml (falling back
to ~/.config/goldfish/ or ~/.goldfish/):
focus_minutes = 25 break_minutes = 5 long_break_minutes = 15 auto_start_breaks = true auto_start_focus = true
Building
macOS only. Needs Go, Qt 6
(brew install qt), and Task.
task build # build the binary into dist/ ./dist/goldfish # run it task build:app # package a self-contained dist/Goldfish.app bundle task fix # go fix + vet + gofmt
Built with Go and miqt (Qt 6 bindings).
Installing
Goldfish is not notarized by Apple, so macOS Gatekeeper will block it the first time - "Goldfish is damaged and can't be opened" or "can't be opened because it is from an unidentified developer". This is expected for a self-built app.
Move Goldfish.app where you want it (e.g. /Applications) and clear the
quarantine flag once:
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Goldfish.app
Then open it normally. (You only need to do this once per build/download - a locally built bundle that you never download won't be quarantined at all.)
License
MIT