HELP: MX Conky

Background

MX Conky is a tool whose goal is to render the use and customization of conky scripts available to a wider and non-technical audience. It consists of a gui program and an associated data file of conkies (legacy versions) that have been tested and edited for use in MX Linux. The default conkies can be viewed in the Conky Images gallery.

Conky is an extremely versatile system monitoring utility that can display on your desktop a wide variety of information. Many creative conky scripts exist that have expanded its original scope to include music, email, weather, updates, etc. Its range has been further extended with the use of Lua, a lightweight and powerful programming language.

Many users find conkies difficult to customize. They come from many different sources, they follow no consistent configuration layout (in legacy format), many of them no longer work for one reason or another, and the text itself is difficult to understand. The situation was made much easier by Conky Manager (see below). MX Conky was created in an effort to supplement Conky Manager and provide an easy starting point for users lacking prior experience.

Installation

MX Conky and its data pack are installed by default from MX-17 onward; users on earlier versions of MX Linux can install it from the repos. Its installation brings Conky Manager along as a dependency.

Use

NB: do not follow traditional directions about putting conkies in your /home folder (as ~/.conkyrc) and enabling conky to autostart. MX Conky is designed to be used in conjunction with Conky Manager, which is a much better method to deal with them.

Step 1

 Conky Manager should be used to set a whole group of configurations.

See HELP — Conky Manager for more.

Step 2

NB: changes are instantly recorded in the script. At the end of the session, you will be given the opportunity to save the original that you started with and, if you say yes, a file will be placed in the same folder with a time stamp that you can rename as desired.

Once you have used Conky Manager to carry out basic functions, you are ready to tweak a conky using MX Conky. When you launch it, one of two things will happen:

  1. If a conky is already running, MX Conky will open ready to edit it.
  2. If no conky is running, MX Conky will display the available conkies in the default location (~/.conky/); navigate to the one you want and launch it by clicking OK.
MX Conky

Fields from top to bottom:

Example

Let’s use MX Conky to alter the color of the default conkies, taking MX-Cowan_less as our example. Here is the original:

Cowan Purple

Launch MX Conky, navigate to that conky and open it, and click on Run so you can see it while you work. Here is the Color field you will see at the bottom of the MX Conky screen:

colors

Now let’s change the purple to, say, dark orange. Click the little change box with three dots to the right of the purple “Color2” and use one of three ways to change it:

The result will be an instant change to the conky something like this:

Orange Conky

Notice that it took less than one minute to make the change!

Tips and tricks

cd /sys/class/net && ls --ignore=lo

Technical details

lua ./convert.lua old_conkyrc new_conkyrc
  • The included conkies are based on the work of various artistic creators. They have been updated for function (e.g., switching to new network interface names), restructured to work with MX Conky and edited for simplicity.
  • To add a new conky so it will work with MX Conky:
  • Resources

    License: here.

    Development history: Jerry3904 and Adrian

    v. 20180225