January 5, 2026
Tick‑tock, hot takes o’clock
Zeit v1
Time tracker gets a glow‑up; jokes fly, ‘no‑cops’ license ignites debate
TLDR: Zeit v1 is a rebuilt, simpler time‑tracking tool with a faster, self‑contained setup. Commenters loved the polish but made the “no‑cops” license, Vercel name confusion, and a cheeky piracy quip the main event, turning a quiet release into a loud debate about ethics and openness.
Five years in, the minimalist command‑line time tracker got a full rebuild as Zeit v1—and the internet immediately clocked in. Fans praised the cleaner, speedier design and simple storage swap (it now keeps your stuff in one built‑in, fast store instead of juggling files). The dev skipped SQLite to keep cross‑platform builds easy, and even gave the terminal interface a glow‑up with prettier output. But the star of the thread wasn’t the code—it was the comments.
Confusion kicked things off: one user admitted it took a minute to figure out Zeit is a task time tracker (“like a stopwatch for projects”), while another mixed it up with the old name of Vercel, sparking a nostalgia wave. The jokes rolled in too: a groan‑worthy German pun landed, and an off‑topic site‑footer line—“If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing”—became an instant catchphrase people said they were “stealing.”
Then came the drama: a sharp‑eyed commenter flagged the project’s license, which bans use by police, tax agencies, the military, and certain surveillance‑linked firms. Cue fireworks. One side cheered the ethics stance; others argued it muddies what “open source” means. So yes, Zeit v1 looks slick and practical—but the community’s hottest timer was on the license debate, not the feature list. Check the repo: codeberg.org/mrus/zeit and the legacy code here.
Key Points
- •Zeit has been fully rewritten into Zeit v1 after nearly five years, aiming to streamline features and improve maintainability.
- •The v0 version accumulated non-intuitive features and suboptimal code, leading to an unwieldy user experience.
- •Zeit v1 replaces BuntDB with BadgerDB v4, an embedded key-value database in pure Go, storing both time entries and user configurations.
- •SQLite was avoided due to CGO requirements and lack of a pure Go implementation, which complicates cross-compilation.
- •The project is reorganized into database, business logic, CLI, and output layers, with the CLI rendered using Lipgloss v2.