A desktop system monitor for Linux and BSD systems.
"Conky is free software and runs in X on Linux and BSD. Originally a fork of Torsmo, Conky's torsmo-based code is BSD licensed. New code in Conky has been licensed under the GPL 3.0."
—SourceForge
Conky is a persistent graphical system monitor that runs on most *nix operating systems using X11 or Wayland. It is highly configurable, allowing not just the display of system status and rescources, but the running of scripts using Lua natively using inbuilt Lua hooks, allowing for a high degree of customisation.
My conky setup includes local time, date and weather, battery status, CPU and memory usage, free disk space and wifi status. If you really want to see how it looks, it's available to see at on Imgur and the config file is listed below. ¹
Its complexity can appear baffling at first look, but there are any number of resources available online, including an annotated overview of settings and options on GitHub. The avid fans of the software will also often post their configs, making it easier to try and test options for yourself.
Whilst I do use other monitoring options in the terminal, having this pinned on the desktop give me an instant overview of my system, even to the point of giving me custom output, as when i run my custom tea timer script (showing a running countdown), very useful. Above all, it's pretty, and does occasionally attract comments from those peeking at my desktop, a source of much personal geek pride.
¹ My current conky setup config file may be seen at https://termbin.com/7xgo for the next 30 days. Feel free to ask me to repost after it expires.
$ xclip -o | wc -w
255
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