Pomodoro Timer for macOS

I built a minimal Pomodoro timer that lives in the macOS menu bar. There are many of these little Pomodoro apps on the internet, but most of them are scammy adware or charge a fee for bloated premium features I don’t need. So I made my own that’s free and designed exactly for my minimalist needs.

Pomodoro Screenshot

Features

The app does exactly what I need and nothing more:

  • 25-minute work timer, 5-minute break
  • Start / Pause / Reset controls
  • Circular progress ring with countdown in the menu bar
  • Log what you’re working on before each session
  • Add notes during a session
  • Reflect on what you accomplished after each session
  • macOS notification when timer completes
  • Plain text log file for easy querying
  • Configurable log file location
  • No dock icon — lives entirely in the menu bar

Install

Requires macOS 14+

  1. Download Pomodoro-v1.0.zip from the latest release
  2. Unzip and drag Pomodoro.app to /Applications
  3. Since the app isn’t notarized, right-click the app and select Open the first time to bypass Gatekeeper
  4. To start on login: System Settings > General > Login Items > add Pomodoro.app

Build from Source

If you’d prefer to build it yourself:

brew install xcodegen
xcodegen generate
DEVELOPER_DIR=/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer xcodebuild \
  -project Pomodoro.xcodeproj \
  -scheme Pomodoro \
  -configuration Release \
  build
cp -r ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData/Pomodoro-*/Build/Products/Release/Pomodoro.app /Applications/

Log Format

One of my favorite features is the plain text logging. Sessions are logged to ~/pomodoro.log (configurable in Settings). Each line is tab-separated, making it easy to query with standard Unix tools:

2026-02-18 10:00:00	start	Fix login bug
2026-02-18 10:05:32	note	Found root cause in token refresh
2026-02-18 10:12:15	note	Also need to update tests
2026-02-18 10:25:00	done	Rewrote auth token refresh logic

Shell Helper

I added this to my ~/.zshrc to quickly query my pomodoro log:

pomo() {
  case "$1" in
    yesterday) grep "$(date -v-1d +%Y-%m-%d)" ~/pomodoro.log ;;
    search)    grep -i "$2" ~/pomodoro.log ;;
    *)         grep "$(date +%Y-%m-%d)" ~/pomodoro.log ;;
  esac
}

After running source ~/.zshrc, I can use:

pomo                    # today's entries
pomo yesterday          # yesterday's entries
pomo search login       # search all entries (case-insensitive)

The source code is available on GitHub.