+why

README.md

@@ -3,6 +3,28 @@
 A simple plugin for [Starship](https://github.com/starship/starship),
 which  shows the elapsed time of the current [watson](https://github.com/jazzband/Watson) project.
 
+## Why?
+
+Unfortunately `watson status` itself is  just too verbose. I only need
+the hours elapsed. Manipulating the output were too slow, it lead to a partially hanging prompt.
+
+I tried several variants, among these:
+
+```toml
+# using sed
+command = "watson status -e | sed -e 's/ ago//' -e 's/ seconds/s/' -e 's/ minutes/m/' -e 's/ hours/h/' -e 's/just now/0/'"
+
+# use perl to parse the status file directly
+command = 'perl -n -e "if (/start.: (\d+)/) { \$diff = (time - \$1) / 3600; printf \"%.02fh\n\", \$diff; }" < ~/.config/watson/state'
+
+# use bash, date and https://github.com/TLINDEN/rpnc direclty on the status file
+command = 'if [[ "$(grep start ~/.config/watson/state)" =~ ([0-9]+) ]]; then echo $(("$(date +%s)" - "${BASH_REMATCH[1]}")) 3600 / | rpn; fi'
+```
+
+This lille tool here is written  in go, reasonably fast, it parses the
+watson JSON  status file directly,  calculates the elapsed  time since
+the start of the running project and prints it. Pretty simple.
+
 ## Setup
 
 You'll need the Golang toolchain for this (version 1.23+).