Zeitkatze is time cat -- literally

What's the simplest stopwatch in a linux console? Well, just type time cat to start, and push ctrl-c to stop. Zeitkatze is the same thing, with just a little extra.

It continuously updates the elapsed time display, you can hit ctrl-c once to display a split time, and if you hit ctrl-d, (or ctrl-c twice in quick succession), zeitkatze prints the total time and exits.

And it has colors! Enabled by default, you can disable them with the environment variable ZEITKATZE_COLOR. Just set it to 0 (export ZEITKATZE_COLOR=0 does that, or add ZEITKATZE_COLOR=0 to your shell rc). There's even a command line switch to override it: --color or -c to enable colors, --no-color or -n to disable.