Conky - light-weight system monitor

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Well... this is the second application that I have worked on to create theme ( after Coverglobuss) and even now I am still developing it and there are over 50 themes that I have created.

Maybe those who are reading this already know what conky is, but it's better if I just give a little explanation because in my other writings I explain how to use the themes I've created, so let's get straight to it then...

What is Conky?

Conky is a free, light-weight system monitor for X, that displays any kind of information on your desktop. It can also run on Wayland, macOS, output to your console, a file, or even HTTP. Conky is a free software desktop system monitor for the X Window System. It is available for Linux, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD.[3] Conky is highly configurable[4][5][6] and is able to monitor many system variables including the status of the CPU, memory, swap space, disk storage, temperatures, processes, network interfaces, battery power, system messages, e-mail inboxes, Arch Linux updates, many popular music players (MPD, XMMS2, BMPx, Audacious, etc.), weather updates, breaking news, and much more.[7] Unlike system monitors that use high-level widget toolkits to render their information, Conky is drawn directly in an X window. This allows it to be configured such that it consumes relatively few system resources.

It was designed as a replacement for torsmo, which appears to not have been in development since 2004. This application is managed by Bernden Matthews in his GitHub repository and continues to be updated to this day. The themes created can have a wide variety of applications, because apart from using available variables, we can also use scripts from other programming languages such as Bash, Lua, Python, etc.

conky theme example

Features

As mentioned in the github source, Conky can display more than 300 built-in objects, including support for:
  • A plethora of OS stats (uname, uptime, CPU usage, mem usage, disk usage, "top" like process stats, and network monitoring, just to name a few)
  • Built-in IMAP and POP3 support.
  • Built-in support for many popular music players (MPD, XMMS2, Audacious)
  • Can be extended using built-in Lua support, or any of your own scripts and programs (more)
  • Built-in Imlib2 and Cairo bindings for arbitrary drawing with Lua (more). Runs on Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD,DragonFlyBSD, NetBSD, Solaris, Haiku, and macOS!
  • Docker image available for amd64, armv7, and aarch64 (aka armv8)
... and much much more. Conky can display information either as text, or using simple progress bars and graph widgets, with different fonts and colours, as well as handle mouse events.

Installing Conky

Conky is available on almost all distros, but if you want to try installing it directly from the source (Github), please visit here ,The advantage is that you will be able to try the latest features or get the latest version faster. However, if you want to get a more stable version, please follow these instructions. The installation method is quite easy as follows

Debian / Ubuntu / Linux mint ( and other debian based distro )

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install conky-all

Arch Linux 

$ pacman -S conky
 
# query aur database
$ yay -Ss conky 

Fedora

$ sudo dnf install conky 

 Gentoo Linux

$ emerge conky

NixOS

$ nix-env -i conky 

FreeBSD

# Conky is in ports in `sysutils/conky`
$ cd /usr/ports/sysutils/conky
$ make install clean

# Alternatively, install the binary package.
$ pkg install conky

macOS

You need to Install Xcode & Xcode command-line tools 
To install Xcode command-line tools run 

$ xcode-select --install
$ cd build
$ cmake ..
$ make install 

Running Conky 

Actually, there are several ways to run Conky, but because what is being reviewed here is my theme, we will only use two ways

Using Conky Manager 2

This method is quite easy because it is enough to tick the desired theme. But with some adjustments that you can read here.

By execute command or script

In the theme zip file downloaded in the pling store I have included a script to run the theme in that folder, you can run the script in the terminal. or you want to run bash commands with the format

$ conky -c config_path

For example

$ conky -c $HOME/.config/conky/Mimosa/Mimosa.conf

All of my themes use this method, and it may be different from other people's. 

Conclusion

What is written here is not a reference to how to run Conky as a whole, everyone has different creativity. If there are errors or suggestions for this article, please write in the comments



Regards
Closebox73

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