Twenty-Twenty-Twenty

20-20-20 is a program that alerts every 20 minutes to look something at 20 feet away for 20 seconds, written in Golang. This is done to reduce eye fadigue 1. While controversial 2, it is a simple rule to remember and can help long screen usage sessions.

How to use

If you have Go installed, you can run:

# doesn't work in macOS since it needs an signed app bundle
go run github.com/thiagokokada/twenty-twenty-twenty@latest

If you have nix installed, you can run:

# works in macOS too
nix run github:thiagokokada/twenty-twenty-twenty

You can also download the pre-build binaries in releases.

Below are instructions on how to get the best experience in each OS.

macOS

Warning

The releases available for macOS are signed with the adhoc certificate. They will not work as-is unless re-signed. If you're using macOS, the easiest way to get it working is compiling it yourself.

In macOS, just run TwentyTwentyTwenty_<arch>.app. I recommend moving TwentyTwentyTwenty_<arch>.app to ~/Applications

For a better experience, configure the notification type in "System Settings" -> "Notifications" -> "TwentyTwentyTwenty" to use "Alerts". This will result in the notification to stay until the end of the duration period instead of disappearing in a few seconds.

Windows

In Windows, just run twenty-twenty-twenty-windows-<arch>.exe.

You may want to disable the sounds either from the application (using the system tray) or from Windows itself (you can disable sounds for notifications from a specific application).

The second option is probably a better idea since the application play sounds when the notification starts and ends, to remind you that you can look at the screen again.

Linux/*BSDs

Run in terminal:

$ ./twenty-twenty-twenty -help
Usage of ./twenty-twenty-twenty:
  -disable-sound
        disable notification sound
  -duration uint
        how long each pause should be in seconds (default 20)
  -frequency uint
        how often the pause should be in seconds (default 1200)
  -pause uint
        how long the pause (from systray) should be in seconds (default 3600)
  -version
        print program version and exit

How to build

Important

For macOS releases, you will need to install Xcode Command-line Tools first to sign the application:

xcode-select --install

Needs Go 1.24+.

make
make run

With Nix

If you have nix installed, you can also setup the development setup with it:

nix develop

Or if you have nix-direnv:

direnv allow

Optional features

You can enable/disable optional features by passing the following build tags (e.g.: go build -tags=<tag>):

• cgo: CGO is necessary for some features in some platforms. It is required for darwin, not used in windows, and enables/disables sound support in linux (and other *nix systems)
• nosound: disable sound support.
• nosystray: disable system tray support.

Credits

Notification sound 1 and Notification sound 2 by Joseph SARDIN - https://bigsoundbank.com.

Eye open extracted from Font Awesome, in SVG format from Wikipedia.