Slashtime
This is slashtime, a small program which displays the time in various places.
For the impatient:
$ cargo run
but don't forget to create a tzlist file; see PLACES.
If you just built it locally, then you can run it in-place:
$ target/debug/slashtime
The cities shown by slashtime is drawn from the list found in a file called tzlist in the appropriate place in your home directory. See the PLACES file for a fully documented example.
Circa 2002, a Debian package called gworldclock came with a short shell script called tzwatch which somewhat mimicked its output. Both programs were reasonable enough, but like most timezone things, they displayed the offset from GMT. We've always found that a little useless. Telling me that I am in GMT+11 and someone I want to talk to is shown in GMT-4 still doesn't help me get an intuitive grasp of what the differential is.
So Andrew Cowie wrote a small perl script called slashtime. Named after the
short cut on his employer's website that got you to an HTML version, it started
out life as a Perl script, and gained a bit of a cult following from people who
would put it into their .bash_profiles to run when launching a terminal.
Sometime in 2006, Andrew got the idea to write a GUI version, taking advantage
of the new java-gnome bindings to create a compact and rich presentation of the
time zone information. The previous version of Slashtime was written using the
java-gnome 4.0 bindings and was first packaged by Gentoo Linux as
app-misc/slashtime in 2008.
The program was rewritten in Rust in 2023.
White: business hours
Gray: civil hours (it is still "civilized" to call someone at that hour)
Black: night time
Simple: that's when hackers go to bed! So black at the bottom means that someone hard core may still be reachable online if they're up working, whereas black on top really means they're asleep.