Modeling Browser History in Emacs

If there were an underappreciated web browser feature, it would be this: history.

On many browsers, history is invoked with C-h (Ctrl+h). Vivaldi shows history as a calendar. The user can choose from time intervals of Day, Week or Month and search for a keyword within that time interval.¹

I tend to write about a topic after I've forgotten where I read about it. Suppose I recall reading about "nslookup" but can't remember when or where. Simple. Vivaldi remembered that I visited a page with "nslookup" on Windows Central on July 3 at 21:26. Being able to find such references helps.

History helped me track my hours when my employer required bi-weekly timesheets. I would combine browser history with Org's clock report to get a result I was actually proud to submit.

I still track my time with Org, which stores start and stop times in a drawer called LOGBOOK. But I tend to forget to start or stop the clock, so the times are unreliable. Sometimes a file's timestamp can help me reconstruct the LOGBOOK. But at times like these I'd wish that Emacs had a history feature.

Actually Emacs does have a few history-like features. One example is savehist-mode,² which "save[s] the values of minibuffer history variables." Unfortunately, timestamps are not included.

So I configured Emacs to write a timestamp to the *Messages* buffer every time it loads or saves a file. This frees me from switching to a file manager to check a file's timestamp. Using Customize, I added functions to find-file-hook and after-save-hook:³

(find-file-hook
 '(lambda nil
     (message "%s: Loaded %s"
              (format-time-string "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S" (current-time))
              (buffer-file-name))))
(after-save-hook
 '(lambda nil
    (message "%s: Saved %s"
             (format-time-string "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S" (current-time))
             (buffer-file-name))))

Whenever I realize I'm not clocked in, I visit the *Messages* buffer and look for the first occurrence of something like this:

2026-07-20 12:32:33: Saved c:/Users/RayZ/AppData/Roaming/HOME/blog.org

Then I clock in and change the start time to 12:33.⁴

Similarly, if I've been away from the computer and realize I'm still clocked in, I'll look for the last occurrence of the message, clock out, and change the time accordingly.

The *Messages* buffer is temporary; timestamps from an earlier Emacs session are lost. But this simple system does what I need.

What methods do you use to track project time?

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¹ The user also can view history as a simple list in reverse chronological order. And the search can span the entire history, if desired.

² https://doc.endlessparentheses.com/Fun/savehist-mode.html

³ Note that these expressions are arguments to custom-set-variables.

⁴ Timesheets required time entries in units of hours rounded to one decimal. A tenth hour is 6 minutes. So I configured Org to round clock times to 3 minutes by setting org-clock-rounding-minutes to 3. This affords more granularity. With several clock entries per heading, an even number of 0:03 clock entries would produce the desired tenth hour accuracy.