Beat Time

Do you hate time zones? Do you have trouble coordinating with people across the planet? Do you long for a system that could handle all of this? Especially one that came out about 10 years before it was necessary AT ALL? If so, my oddly specific friend, this is for you!

I'LL CONFESS. In 1998, Swatch looked at the entire planet's clocks and said "no." They chopped the day into 1,000 pieces, called each one a ".beat," pinned it to midnight in a small Swiss town, and announced that time zones were over. Suddenly, time is the same everywhere! @500 in Tokyo is @500 in Toledo. There is nothing to convert! Ever! And no one cared.

Except me. And if you've read THIS far, probably YOU.

BUT PONG, YOU ASK. If @330 is the same everywhere, how do I know whether my friend in Manila is eating lunch or asleep with her phone face down? That question killed Internet Time in 1999, and this plugin answers it. Right-click the beat. A grid unfolds: one thousand beats across the top, and one strip for every person you care about. Strips glow during business hours and go dark for the dead of night. Hover any beat and every row converts. Know in one glance that @330 is a perfectly civilized 2:55pm in Manila and a crime in Los Angeles.

AND THERE'S MORE. Add a zone from a searchable list of all 598 zones from tzdata. Rename it. Drag it to reorder. Remove it. Mouse? Keyboard? Yes. Pile on zones and the bar scrolls them past like a ticker at a stock exchange that trades in beats. It follows your Omarchy theme so it never ruins the vibe. It uses no network, asks for no privileges, runs no daemon, and will always pay its bills ON TIME. .beat time, that is!

THE BOTTOM LINE. Swatch was right. They were just early. Free, MIT licensed, built on Simon Späti's excellent omarchy-timezones-plugin. Beat math follows the canonical definition from the SwatchTime organization. By TheMightyPong (PongAlmighty on GitHub). To kick the tires:

omarchy plugin add https://github.com/PongAlmighty/beat-time-revival.git --enable

And look at the clock. It's @something. It always was.

Install

omarchy plugin add https://github.com/PongAlmighty/beat-time-revival.git --enable

Usage

• Hover the beat: compact view of your zones' local times. With up to three rows in the popup the view sits still; more than that scroll through slowly, ticker style.
• Right click: open/close the beat grid (Escape also closes)
• Hover a beat in the popup: converts that beat across all zones
• Middle click: refresh timezone offsets
• Left click: unused, left to the bar and compositor

In the popup:

Mouse	Keyboard	Does
hover a row	j / k	move the cursor
drag a row's header	Shift+J / Shift+K, Shift+Down / Shift+Up	move the row down / up
click a row's header	Enter	rename its label and short label
✕ at the row's right edge	x	remove the zone (home never is)
"+ Add zone"	a	add a zone: pick it, adjust the label, Enter
	Esc	cancel an edit, or close the popup

Changes are written straight back to the widget's entry in shell.json. Scripts and keybindings can do the same over IPC:

omarchy-shell io.github.pongalmighty.beattime add              # open the popup on the picker
omarchy-shell io.github.pongalmighty.beattime addZone Asia/Tokyo
omarchy-shell io.github.pongalmighty.beattime removeZone Asia/Tokyo
omarchy-shell io.github.pongalmighty.beattime toggleAlignment  # @000 or home midnight at the left edge
omarchy-shell io.github.pongalmighty.beattime toggleHourFormat # 24-hour or 12-hour clock
omarchy bar set io.github.pongalmighty.beattime zones '[...]' --json   # replace the whole list

A zone added without a short label gets tzdata's abbreviation ("JST") when it has a conventional one, else the first three letters of the city.

Configure

Works out of the box: the home row is Omarchy's system timezone, plus US East Coast and West Coast as example zones.

Configure the widget entry in ~/.config/omarchy/shell.json (hot-reloads on save). Example:

{
  "id": "io.github.pongalmighty.beattime",
  "centibeats": false,
  "glyphs": true,
  "beatsPerCell": 50,
  "alignment": "beats",
  "hourFormat": 24,
  "homeZones": ["America/Chicago"],
  "zones": [
    { "label": "Home", "shortLabel": "HOME", "zone": "", "home": true },
    { "label": "Biel", "shortLabel": "BMT", "zone": "Europe/Zurich" },
    { "label": "East Coast", "shortLabel": "NY", "zone": "America/New_York" },
    { "label": "Cagayan de Oro", "shortLabel": "CDO", "zone": "Asia/Manila", "abbr": "PHT" }
  ]
}

• zones — the rows of the popup, top to bottom.
  • zone — IANA timezone name; "" with "home": true tracks the system timezone.
  • label — the location name shown in the popup.
  • shortLabel — used in the bar's hover view.
  • abbr — optional override for the timezone abbreviation shown in parentheses.
• homeZones — system timezones that keep the home row's configured label. Outside this list (traveling), the home row is relabeled by where the system clock actually is. Empty (default): always label by the system timezone.
• centibeats — show @767.42 instead of @767 in the bar. Default false.
• glyphs — show the day/night glyph (󰖙 / 󰖔) next to each zone in the bar hover view and popup. Default true.
• beatsPerCell — grid granularity: one of 25, 40, 50, 100, 125, 200. Default 50 (20 columns of 72 minutes). 40 gives 25 columns of roughly one hour each.
• alignment — where the grid's left edge sits. "beats" (default) starts every row at @000; "home" starts every row at the home row's local midnight, so home reads 0 to 23 left to right and the ruler starts mid-day. The first button at the popup's bottom right, across from "Add zone", toggles this and saves it here. Row order is the same either way.
• hourFormat — 24 (default) or 12. With 12, row headers and the bar's hover view read 7:48pm and grid cells read 7p. The second button at the popup's bottom right toggles this and saves it here.
• tickerZones — how many popup rows, home included, the bar's hover view shows at rest. With more rows than this, the view stays as wide as the entries that fit under that count and the full list scrolls through it. Default 3.
• tickerSpeed — ticker scroll speed in pixels per second. Default 22.
• icon — optional glyph drawn before the beat in the bar. Default none.
• hoverExpand — set false to keep the bar pill static instead of expanding on hover. Default true.

Move it in the bar:

omarchy bar move io.github.pongalmighty.beattime --section center

How the beat is computed

Following swatchtime/sample-code:

bielMs = (utcMs + 3600000) mod 86400000     // Biel = UTC+1, fixed
beats  = bielMs / 86400                     // 1 beat = 86.4 s
label  = "@" + zeroPad3(floor(beats))

The grid's column 0 is the most recent Biel midnight (23:00 UTC), or with alignment: "home" the home row's most recent local midnight. A zone's cell at column c covers the beatsPerCell beats after that, and is labeled and tinted by the local hour at the middle of that span, the hour most of the cell falls in. Hover a cell for the exact time. Centibeats are rounded to two decimals before wrapping, so the display never flashes @1000.00.

The only difference from the reference snippet is millisecond rather than whole-second precision, so a beat turns over at exactly 86.4 s rather than on the next whole second. The reference test vectors pass either way; see test/model.test.js (node --test test/).

What it runs and touches

No network, no daemon, no elevated privileges, no external packages.

• Reads the clock and tzdata through date and timedatectl (TZ=<zone> date +'%z %Z' per configured zone, timedatectl list-timezones for the picker). Zone names are validated against [A-Za-z0-9_/+-] before they reach a shell.
• Writes only the widget's own entry in ~/.config/omarchy/shell.json, and only through the shell's updateEntryInline API, when you edit zones in the popup or over IPC. Nothing else in your configuration is touched.
• Runs inside the Omarchy shell process like every plugin, with your user's permissions.

Remove

omarchy plugin remove io.github.pongalmighty.beattime

License

MIT. See LICENSE, which retains the original copyright notices.