stretchly Reminds You To Take Breaks From Your Computer (Open Source, Cross-Platform)

stretchly is an open source, cross-platform break time reminder. The Electron application sits in your tray, reminding you to take breaks from working on the computer.

The application is designed to be easy to use, but also flexible. You can start using it as soon as you install it, without having to dig into its settings. After 10 minutes, it notifies you to take a 20 second break. It does this every 10 minutes, with a larger 5-minute break every 30 minutes.

The break duration and interval can be customized, along with various other aspects, like only enabling microbreaks or breaks, enabling or disabling strict mode (breaks can't be finished early), and more advanced options.

You can pause break reminders for 1 hour, 2 hours, 5 hours, until morning, or indefinitely, from the stretchly tray icon menu.

A microbreak notification

Break ideas (like "Stretch your arms", "Slowly look all the way left, then right", "Slowly tilt head to side and hold for 5-10 seconds", and so on) are shown by default, but can be turned off from the application settings.

The application also allows choosing from 5 color themes, as well as pick from 3 sounds (or silence) to be played at the end of a break:

Full-screen mode for breaks is available, but it does not work on Linux.

For future releases, the plan is to add a history / timeline of breaks, as well as implement a color picker, allowing users to apply any color they wish to the break notifications background.

To use stretchly on Gnome Shell, you'll need an extension like the AppIndicator support extension that's shipped by default in Ubuntu. In elementary OS 5.0 Juno you can follow these instructions for re-enabling Ayatana AppIndicators.

Download stretchly

The developer provides offline and web installers for Windows, and a DMG for macOS. For Linux, the GitHub releases page has binaries like AppImage, RPM, and DEB.

To get stretchly installed from DEB or RPM package to run on startup, open Startup Applications or equivalent, click Add, and add stretchly with the following command: /opt/stretchly/stretchly.