Overview
Tako is a Visual Studio Code extension that collects, aggregates, and visualizes interaction data. It records fine-grained raw interaction data from the IDE, aggregates it into development activities (e.g., navigation, editing), and provides a set of interactive visualizations that help developers reflect on their activities, and ultimately understand how they spend their time.
In practice, Tako acts as an IDE interaction monitor: once the developer gives consent, it silently records a programming session in the background, showing the recording status in the status bar. Because it builds mostly on the Language Server Protocol, it works with any language whose features are exposed through LSP — Scala through Metals, for instance — in addition to dedicated support for TypeScript and JavaScript.
Recorded sessions are browsed through the Tako Explorer, which groups them by workspace and shows start time, duration, and the number of captured events. Each session gives access to its metadata, to the list of raw LSP events in JSON format, and to the two analytical views described below.
Session Digest
The session digest, inspired by Minelli et al.↗, is the main analytics view provided by Tako. In the digest, you can inspect some basic session statistics, the hottest document section, the timeline, and the hot changes tree.
The hottest document section highlights the top 3 documents according to the number of events. Events are grouped by their type: Edit events, Navigation events (e.g., when moving from one method to another one), and Other events (e.g., setting a breakpoint in the debugger).
The timeline shows how events are distributed over time together with a chart which shows the amount of active diagnostics (e.g., errors and warnings).
The last part of the session digest shows the hot changes tree and some other statistics. The hot changes tree visualizes the files and program entities which were most involved in edit events. By hovering on a node of the tree, you can inspect its name, type, and number of changes. This will give you a hint on what the session was about.
GitHub Copilot Digest
From version 1.2.0, Tako also tracks GitHub Copilot events. As with the other features, the events are stored only locally. In particular, Tako tracks if you accept a suggestion or not. You can see basic statistics on your Copilot usage in a dedicated analytics view, the Copilot Digest, that you can access from the usual panel.
Privacy
Tako is designed around a strict privacy guarantee: it does not send data to any remote server. Everything is stored locally and analyzed on the developer’s own machine, and remains entirely under their control. The extension is freely available on the Visual Studio Marketplace↗.
