Moodly

You already know when you have had a good hour. You rarely know why, and you almost never notice the hour you spent switching between things without settling into any of them.

Moodly sits quietly in a corner of your screen and notices the shape of your work — steady, bursty, or absent — without knowing anything about the work itself.

Any of those can wear an emoji of your choosing. Rest the pointer on the widget and a line for the day appears beneath the character — the same line all day, a different one tomorrow, in Greek or English. Some are ours; some are from people who thought about work and time long before anyone measured it, and those carry their author and reference.

Every second, Moodly asks the operating system two questions: how many input events have happened in total, and how long since the last one. From the difference between one second and the next it builds two numbers.

Intensity — how much is happening, against your own normal. Keys count as one, a click as half, a right-click as nearly one (it is sixty times rarer, so it carries more meaning), a scroll as a tenth, since scrolls arrive in handfuls.

Unevenness — how ragged the last ten seconds were, measured as the spread of activity divided by its average. Steady work sits near zero; alternating full-tilt and nothing tops out around one.

Those two numbers decide the mood:

Those last two lines matter more than they look.

Reading a long document produces very little input with long gaps in it, which is mathematically wildly uneven — an early version of this widget called that stress. Below half your normal activity, unevenness is ignored entirely.

But quiet is not one thing. Research on cognitive load describes what happens when a task gets hard: typing slows, clicking drops, pauses lengthen — and the person is still very much there. Calling that "calm" would be reading ease into difficulty. So the quiet is split by how the gaps fall over half a minute: regular light contact with real gaps between is someone working something out; steady low input is someone at ease; nothing at all is an empty chair. Where that comes from is set out below.

Working rhythm is naturally uneven. A widget that reacted to every second of it would change six times a minute and tell you nothing.

A mood has to hold for 25 seconds before it is shown, and once shown it stays for at least two minutes. The exception is walking away, which is reported at once — there is nothing to deliberate about.

Nothing is compared against an average. Moodly learns what half an hour of your ordinary work looks like and reports how far the present sits from that.

The same reading means different things for different people, which is the point: someone who types all day and someone who mostly reads and clicks each get an honest picture of their own rhythm. It also uses the median rather than the mean, so one furious afternoon does not redefine your normal.

The moods are not invented. Each transition in Moodly follows a direction that published work on keyboard and mouse behaviour has already observed — with one important limit, stated below.

• The rhythm of typing carries emotional state. In a field study with self-reported emotions, models built on nothing but keystroke timing told apart states such as focus, frustration and distraction well above chance. — Epp, Lippold & Mandryk, Identifying emotional states using keystroke dynamics, CHI 2011.
• Stress shows in the intervals between keys and in where the pauses fall, not only in what is typed. — Vizer, Zhou & Sears, Automated stress detection using keystroke and linguistic features, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 2009.
• Under pressure people press harder and hold the mouse more — the body leans into the machine. — Hernandez, Paredes, Roseway & Czerwinski, Under pressure: sensing stress of computer users, CHI 2014.
• When a task gets harder, keystroke speed and clicks go down and the mouse sits idle for longer. This is the finding behind working it out: a quiet that is effort, not ease. — Lim, Ayesh & Stacey, Using mouse and keyboard dynamics to detect cognitive stress during mental arithmetic, 2014.

The limit: those studies had richer data than Moodly allows itself — key identities, timings per key, pressure, mouse paths. Moodly keeps only counts per second, by design, so it borrows the direction of each effect rather than any model trained on it. The thresholds are then set against your own baseline, not against a population.

That makes this a working model, not a validated instrument, and it is treated as one. The intention is to keep bringing published evidence into it — on pause structure, on individual baselines, on what counts alone can and cannot tell apart — and to keep the model open here, in plain language, so that anyone can see what a mood is made of and argue with it.

This is the part worth reading carefully.

Moodly reads counters the operating system already keeps, or makes them the same way. On macOS that is CGEventSourceCounterForEventType — a function that returns a number and nothing else: how many key presses have occurred since the machine started. On Windows it registers for raw input and counts arrivals, discarding each event once its kind is known.

There is no keystroke log, because there is nothing to log. The interface carries no key codes, no characters, no window titles, no clipboard. Not "we choose not to store it" — it never arrives in the first place.

Concretely:

• No accessibility permission is requested. Reading what you type would require one on macOS. Moodly never asks, because it never reads.
• Mouse movement is ignored on purpose: it is noise, not intent.
• Nothing is transmitted. No account, no server, no telemetry, no analytics. The only network the app ever touches is GitHub's public releases API, and only when you press "Check" for updates — and, if you then press "Update now", the download of the new version itself.
• Your settings are one plain JSON file in your own user folder. Open it, edit it, delete it.

You do not have to take this on trust. On macOS:

# Every network connection the app has open — expect none while it runs
lsof -i -a -p $(pgrep -x Moodly)

# Whether it holds accessibility access — it is not in the list
sqlite3 "$HOME/Library/Application Support/com.apple.TCC/TCC.db" \
  "select client from access where service='kTCCServiceAccessibility'"

On Windows, Resource Monitor shows the same: no outbound connections. On Linux, ss -p | grep -i moodly.

Moodly records nothing that identifies you and transmits nothing anywhere, so there is no personal data to protect, disclose or delete — the counters it reads are the same ones any screensaver uses to decide the machine is idle.

That said: this is a tool for watching your own rhythm on your own machine. Installing it on someone else's computer to observe them would be a different thing entirely, and in most places an unlawful one. It has no remote reporting, no hidden mode and no dashboard for a third party — by design, so it cannot become that.

Measured on an idle machine, with the widget running and visible:

Built with Tauri and Rust, using the system's own web view rather than shipping a browser — which is why the download is measured in megabytes rather than hundreds of them.

It also sends nothing to itself when nothing changes: the widget is only told about a new reading when the mood, the learning progress or the activity actually differs from the last one.

Download the latest release and pick the file for your system:

Neither build is signed with a paid certificate, so the first launch needs a nudge: on macOS right-click the app and choose Open; on Windows, SmartScreen will warn about an unknown publisher.

On Windows the key code is never read: the event is classified from its flags and discarded in the same function. There is nothing to log because nothing is kept.

Right-click the widget, or use the menu bar icon:

• launch at login — starts quietly when you sign in
• show in the Dock — off by default; it lives in the menu bar instead
• display and corner — which screen, which corner, how far from the edges
• language — Ελληνικά or English
• theme — system, light or dark
• size, glow and glass — the widget's diameter, how far the glow reaches and how solid it is, its colour (each mood's own, or one you fix), and the tint and opacity of the glass inside the circle
• opacity when quiet — how faint it goes when nothing notable is happening
• line of the day — on or off
• your emoji — any emoji for any mood, from a searchable picker

Drag it anywhere and it stays there, across restarts. If that display is later disconnected it returns to its corner, rather than sitting off-screen where you cannot reach it.

The settings window shows how long each mood lasted over the last week or month, in hours and minutes, with a bar for each day. Only changes of mood are written down — a day of work is a few dozen lines — and anything older than twelve months is dropped.

Share saves a 1080 × 1080 image to your Desktop: the period's top mood on a large emoji, the runners-up beneath it. Nothing is posted anywhere; it is a file, and what happens to it is up to you.

Check in the About panel asks GitHub whether a newer version exists. Update now downloads it, verifies its signature against the public key built into the app — a package not signed with the matching private key is refused — installs it, and restarts. Nothing is downloaded until you press the button.

It does not know how you feel.

Typing fast can mean flow or panic; typing little can mean thinking or giving up. No counter can tell those apart, and a program that says otherwise is guessing at you.

What Moodly can honestly say is how you are working, and when that changes — which is the part you can actually do something about.

0.4.0 — Windows counts: raw input arrivals, classified and dropped, no hooks. The widget no longer resizes on hover outside macOS.

0.3.0 — fifty lines from Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Heraclitus, Epicurus, Democritus and Seneca join the line of the day, in Greek and English, each checked against the full text of its source and shown with its reference.

0.2.0 — reports by week and month; share badge; line of the day; your own emoji per mood; theme; size, glow and glass controls; signed in-app updates; app and menu bar icons. Fixes to the line-of-the-day hover, the emoji picker and the circle's glass in light mode.

0.1.0 — first release.

The full list is in each release.