Mild enthusiasm for conky-cli

Duly informed of the joys of conky-cli and the much-needed watch command, I decided to try out both of them this evening, and came up with this.

I find conky-cli to be interesting, but not particularly earth-shattering. Perhaps I’m being overly harsh, but of the meters and statistics I can use (most seem to trigger errors, which I assume means they’re tied to graphical output), are not all that great. I can show disk space usage and bandwidth, but there are already quite a few tools that show those things much better.

And I found it odd that conky wouldn’t overwrite the same display, but instead paused, then spilled out another system report, much as if I had catted a file. I tried to the output_to_ncurses option, but that showed an error, and I checked the ./configure options for an ncurses flag, but I didn’t see anything.

So instead I used watch to make the screenshot there. The watch conky -i 1 command spat out only one iteration, but restarted it every two seconds, giving the effect you see.

It might be more useful under other circumstances, but I think I’ll stick with what I’ve got.