[FEATURE] Session timer that excludes idle time to determine how long actual work took in a session.
Preflight Checklist
- [x] I have searched existing requests and this feature hasn't been requested yet
- [x] This is a single feature request (not multiple features)
Problem Statement
Claude Code has no way to report how long a session actually took. /cost reports tokens and spend, but not elapsed or active time.
The gap matters most on plans with usage limits, where wall-clock time badly overstates effort. In a session today, the span from first artifact to last was 7h 37m, but two long pauses waiting for a limit reset accounted for 4h 16m of that — leaving roughly 3h 20m of real work. There's currently no way to know that from inside the tool.
Asking Claude to work it out is unreliable: it has no session clock, so it can only reconstruct from file modification timestamps. That under-counts badly, since research, reading, and browser turns write no files, and overwritten files lose their earlier timestamps.
Why it's useful: estimating how long tasks really take, deciding whether a workflow is worth repeating, and reporting effort honestly to someone else.
Proposed Solution
a /time command (or an addition to /cost) reporting elapsed wall-clock, active time with idle gaps excluded, and time spent blocked on usage limits — that last one broken out separately, since it's not the user's working time and shouldn't count against a self-assessment of effort.
Alternative Solutions
I had Claude look at artifact modification times to reconstruct a timeline but this is not truly reliable. Some work doesn't cause artifact modification so it may drastically underestimate the time.
Priority
Medium - Would be very helpful
Feature Category
CLI commands and flags
Use Case Example
I would use this feature to understand my interactions with Claude and my effectiveness and efficiency in sessions. It would also help understand when people try to understand their token usage in sessions. Often I have wondered why in some sessions my token limits seemed to run out earlier than other sessions. Part of that is of course the work being done but part of that is not having a way to know what my actual used time vs. idle time is.
Additional Context
_No response_