Timeline fills with hundreds of events from a single app (Adobe Illustrator)

[CrisA-Works]

• I am on the latest ActivityWatch version.
• I have searched the issues of this repo and believe that this is not a duplicate.

• OS name and version: Windows 10
• ActivityWatch version: v0.13.2

Describe the bug

I worked for a couple hours on Illustrator and the Timeline got filled with entries that last just seconds, as if I was alt tabing every couple seconds out of the app.

To Reproduce

I think this is happening because in Illustrator you can enter a special windowed mode, which is essential for my workflow. You can enter such windowed mode by presing TAB.
Steps to reproduce the behavior, for example:
1. Go to Illustrator (any version up from 2016)
2. Press tab multiple times for a couple of minutes
3. Watch the timeline

Expected behavior

A single entry that spans along the entire tested minutes should be appearing.

Documentation

aw-watcher-window_2025-07-29T11-56-37.log

Additional context

[github-actions]

Hi there!
As you're new to this repo, please make sure you've used an appropriate issue template and searched for duplicates (it helps us focus on actual development!). We'd also like to suggest that you read our contribution guidelines and our code of conduct.
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[TimeToBuildBob]

This is a known class of issues with apps that rapidly toggle window state. When you press TAB in Illustrator, it toggles the UI panels, which causes aw-watcher-window to see a rapid series of window attribute changes — each one creates a new heartbeat with different data, resulting in hundreds of tiny events.

Root cause: The heartbeat model merges consecutive events only when the event data is identical. When Illustrator's TAB toggles UI panels, the window title or attributes change slightly on each toggle, so events can't be merged.

Current mitigations:

• The Activity view uses flooding to merge nearby events, so the total time should still be accurate there
• The Timeline view shows raw events, which is why you see the clutter

Possible solutions:

1. Category-level merging: If you set up categories (Settings → Categories) with a rule matching Adobe Illustrator, the category views will group all these events correctly
2. Increase pulsetime: In the webui query settings, increasing the pulsetime parameter would merge events with small gaps more aggressively
3. App-level dedup: A feature where the watcher ignores window attribute changes when the app name stays the same within a short time window — this would need a change to aw-watcher-window

For now, using categories is the best workaround. The underlying issue (rapid window state changes from specific apps) is related to #1177.

[TimeToBuildBob]

Submitted a fix for the Timeline view: ActivityWatch/aw-webui#782

Adds a "Merge by app" toggle in the Filters panel that merges adjacent events from the same application (within a 30-second gap) into single blocks. This directly addresses the visual flooding from rapid title changes when using apps like Adobe Illustrator.

[CrisA-Works]

I've also noticed that using TAB isn't the only culprit of this. Different zoom levels are treated as different windows as well. For example, the window that I'm working on is named "Design 1.ai 100%/RGB", if I scroll to zoom to lets say 200% it goes through each zoom until it gets to 200% (100% -> 115% -> 130% -> 145% -> So on until it reaches 200%). And at each percentage Activity Watch registers it as a new window, lasting only a fraction of a second:

Design 1.ai 100%/RGB (2 minutes)
Design 1.ai 115%/RGB (0.05 seconds)
Design 1.ai 130%/RGB (0.06 seconds)
Design 1.ai 145%/RGB (0.04 seconds)
Design 1.ai 160%/RGB (0.08 seconds)
...
And so on.

This issue could happen with other Adobe software as well, most likely with Photoshop and In Design. I'm not sure about if other apps have a similar behavior with their zoom.

[TimeToBuildBob]

Good catch on the zoom levels — that's a great example of the same root cause (rapid window title changes from the same app). The "Merge by app" toggle in ActivityWatch/aw-webui#782 would handle this case too, since it merges adjacent events from the same application regardless of title changes.

For the watcher-level approach: the exclude_title config in aw-watcher-window could help filter out transient zoom-level suffixes, but that would require a regex pattern like \d+%/RGB$ which is brittle. The webui-side merging is more robust since it doesn't need to anticipate every app's title format quirks.

Long-term, the best fix is probably a configurable "merge by app name within N seconds" option at the query level (similar to how flood() works), which would benefit all views — not just the timeline.