Conky Manager: Manage your monitoring widgets easily

Conky is an application that allows you to manage certain desktop widgets, that is, monitors and displays of desktop parameters on the Operating System. It is free, lightweight, and available on both Linux and BSD systems. They are generally used to show information and statistics of the Work Environment, such as CPU consumption, disk use, RAM use, network speed, among others..

All information is displayed in an elegant and practical way on top of the desktop wallpaper, giving it a feeling of live wallpaper. Allowing easily manage lhe appearance of the information displayed through the Conky configuration files, which come in an easy text format and programming language.

Conky Manager

The Conkys (Configuration Files) have Conky Manager to facilitate their administration, that is to say, Conky Manager is a graphical "Front-End" to manage the Conky configuration files. It provides options to start, stop, explore and edit the themes of the respective Conkys installed in the Operating System.

Conky Manager is currently available at Launchpad thanks to your Developer Tony george, with packages for Ubuntu and derivatives (Mint) or compatible (DEBIAN). And with it you can also make the configured Conkys start when the user is logged in, change their location on the desktop, vary the level of transparency and the size of the window of the installed Conkys widgets.

Conky Manager has changed a lot since the last time it was commented on our blog, in this publication of the year 2013, as it was in version 1.2. As this application there are few available, and the best known and known practice is Cysboard.

Conky Manager installation

Conky Manager can be easily installed and in an automated way from Ubuntu-based Operating Systems with the following procedure:

sudo apt-add-repository -y ppa:teejee2008/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install conky-manager

Or manually by inserting the following lines from the Repositories suitable inside your "sources.list" file:

http://ppa.launchpad.net/teejee2008/ppa/ubuntu artful main

And then install the repository keys, update the package lists and install the program with the command commands:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys B5B116B72D0F61F0
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install conky-manager

Using Conky Manager

As we said before widgets managed with Conky are done via editing their configuration file, but thanks to Conky Manager, this is simplified. This application has an intuitive interface where you can activate and deactivate the widgets, modify their configuration via graphics or by accessing their configuration file, import themes, preview the widgets and other functions.

This application has a graphic menu bar at the top which allows the following actions:

• Go to the next widget
• Go to the previous widget
• Launch the selected widget
• Stop the selected widget
• Configure the selected widget via graphical menu
• Configure selected widget via configuration file
• Open the theme folder to which the selected widget belongs
• Update the list of widgets shown at the bottom
• Generate a preview of the selected widget
• Stop all active widgets
• Import a Conky Theme into Conky Manager

At the end of the Menu Bar are the options of:

• Application Settings menu: Where you can configure that the widgets are activated when the system user session starts, program a delay (delay) to start them on the desktop, and change, add and delete the default directory (folder) where all the files are saved and read. installed widgets and themes.

• Donation Menu: Where you can give a contribution via Paypal or Google Wallet. In addition to sending emails to the project developer and visiting the official website of the project.

At the bottom of the Menu Bar are the options for:

• Browse (Browser): That allows you to view the lower list of widgets, ordered individually or grouped by installed Themes.
• Search Filter: That allows to get the widget or theme installed by matching a string of characters.
• Preview / List buttons: That allow you to configure the way in which the widgets and themes installed below are displayed.

Advanced Widgets Settings

As we said before conky widgets can be managed in 2 ways:

• Via graphic menu
• Via configuration file

The graphic menu allows manage the following aspects of each widget:

• The ubication: Where it can be assigned where it will be located on the desktop, that is, if it will appear in the upper, middle or lower part and in a centered or left or right way. It also allows you to manually adjust the location.
• Size: Where you can change the size (width and height) of the widget.
• Transparency: Where you can configure the level of transparency, background and opacity for each widget.
• Time: Where you can change the format of the time that each widgets will have if it is shown.
• The net: Where each widget is indicated the LAN and WAN interface that it will monitor if it is shown.

For editing via the configuration file you must understand and master the Conky programming language. To support us with this work we can make use of these following links where it is explained to us:

1. Sourceforge
2. Mankier

My custom Conky Widget

As shown in the main image of this article, I have customized the widget "MX-Gotham_rev1_default" that comes in MX-Linux 17.1 and is also in MinerOS GNU / Linux. I am sharing the code for you to study, adapt and incorporate into your own Conky widgets.

use_xft yes
xftfont 123:size=8
xftalpha 0.1
update_interval 1
total_run_times 0

own_window yes
own_window_type normal
own_window_transparent yes
own_window_hints undecorated,below,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager
own_window_colour 000000
own_window_argb_visual yes
own_window_argb_value 0

double_buffer yes
#minimum_size 250 5
#maximum_width 500
draw_shades no
draw_outline no
draw_borders no
draw_graph_borders no
default_color white
default_shade_color red
default_outline_color green
alignment top_middle
gap_x 0
gap_y 50
no_buffers yes
uppercase no
cpu_avg_samples 2
net_avg_samples 1
override_utf8_locale yes
use_spacer yes

minimum_size 0 0
TEXT
${voffset 10}${color EAEAEA}${font GE Inspira:pixelsize=20}*********************MX-Linux 17.1 - AMD64********************${font}${voffset -20}
${voffset 10}${color EAEAEA}${font GE Inspira:pixelsize=120}${time %I:%M}${font}${voffset -84}${offset 10}${color FFA300}${font GE Inspira:pixelsize=42}${time %d} ${voffset -15}${color EAEAEA}${font GE Inspira:pixelsize=22}${time %B} ${time %Y}${font}${voffset 24}${font GE Inspira:pixelsize=58}${offset -148}${time %A}${font}

${voffset 1}${offset 12}${font Ubuntu:pixelsize=12}${color FFA300}HD ${offset 9}$color${fs_free /} / ${fs_size /}${offset 12}${color FFA300}RAM ${offset 9}$color$mem / $memmax${offset 12}${color FFA300}CPU ${offset 9}$color${cpu cpu0}% ${offset 12}${color FFA300}UPTIME ${offset 9}$color$uptime
${voffset 1}${offset 12}${font Ubuntu:pixelsize=12}${color FFA300}USER ${offset 9}$color${user_names} ${offset 12}${color FFA300}KERNEL ${offset 9}$color$kernel ${offset 12}${color FFA300}PC ${offset 9}$color$nodename ${offset 12}${color FFA300}BATTERY ${offset 9}$color${battery_percent BAT0}%
${voffset 1}${offset 12}${font Ubuntu:pixelsize=12}${color FFA300}R. MONITOR ${offset 9}$color${execi 60 xdpyinfo | sed -n -r "s/^\s*dimensions:.*\s([0-9]+x[0-9]+).*/\1/p"} ${offset 12}${color FFA300}CARD VIDEO ${offset 9}$color${exec lspci -v | grep "VGA" | cut -d " " -f05} ${offset 12}${color FFA300}CACHE VIDEO ${offset 9}$color${exec lspci -v -s `lspci | awk '/VGA/{print $1}'` | sed -n '/Memory.*, prefetchable/s/.*\[size=\([^]]\+\)M\]/\1/p'} ${offset 12}${color FFA300}DRIVER ${offset 9}$color${exec lspci -nnk | grep -i vga -A3 | grep 'in use' | cut -d " " -f05} ${offset 12}${color FFA300}A-3D ${offset 9}$color${exec glxinfo | grep "direct rendering: Yes" | awk '{print $3}'}
${voffset 1}${offset 12}${font Ubuntu:pixelsize=12}${color FFA300}TYPE CPU ${offset 9}$color${exec grep "model name" /proc/cpuinfo | sed q | cut -d ":" -f 2 | awk '{print $0}'} ${offset 15}${color FFA300}CORE CPU ${offset 9}$color${exec grep "processor" /proc/cpuinfo | sort -r | sed q | awk '{print $3}'}+1 ${offset 15}${color FFA300}CACHE CPU ${offset 9}$color${exec grep "cache size" /proc/cpuinfo | sed q | cut -d ":" -f 2 | awk '{print $0}'}
${alignc 0}${font Ubuntu:pixelsize=12}${color FFA300}LAN $color${addr eth0} ${color FFA300}UP LAN $color${upspeed eth0} ${color FFA300}DOWN LAN $color${downspeed eth0} ${color FFA300}SENT LAN $color${totalup eth0} ${color FFA300}DOWN LAN $color${totaldown eth0}
${alignc 0}${font Ubuntu:pixelsize=12}${color FFA300}WLAN $color${addr wlan0} ${color FFA300}UP WLAN $color${upspeed eth0} ${color FFA300}DOWN WLAN $color${downspeed eth0} ${color FFA300}SENT WLAN $color${totalup eth0} ${color FFA300}DOWN WLAN $color${totaldown eth0}
${voffset 10}${color EAEAEA}${font GE Inspira:pixelsize=20}**PROYECTO TIC TAC: http://www.proyectotictac.wordpress.com**${font}${voffset 75}

I hope this article is useful for you to manage your own installed and custom Conkys. And I leave you with this complete video so that you learn a little more about the same subject.