Float your conky

Just about every conky setup I see has it pegged to the desktop, immovable and locked into place. Which is fine, except there are times (or at least there are for me) when it might be nice to shift conky slightly, so I can see what’s happening without shifting other windows around.

To that end, I cooked up a .conkyrc file that displays a 200-pixel wide panel with the traditional system indicators in place, plus the settings that float it on the first workspace of my Openbox setup. Because you expect it, here’s a screenshot for you.

With this setup, I can use the ALT key and the left mouse button (the standard window drag combo) to move conky around the desktop, to whereever it suits me. Conky always stays in the background so it never blocks a window, and I keep the nifty transparent mode I like so much.

Here’s the code, to get you started.

double_buffer yes
update_interval 3.0
background yes

own_window yes
own_window_transparent yes
own_window_hints undecorated,below,skip_taskbar

use_xft yes
override_utf8_locale no
xftfont Bitstream Vera Sans Mono:size=7
xftalpha 0.8
draw_shades no
draw_outline yes
draw_borders yes
uppercase yes
use_spacer no

border_margin 9
border_width 1

default_color white
default_shade_color black
default_outline_color black

alignment top_right
minimum_size 200
gap_x 9
gap_y 9

TEXT
${alignc}${time %I:%M %p}, ${time %a}., ${time %b. %e}, ${time %G}
${alignc}Ubuntu Linux $kernel
${alignc}hostname $nodename at ${addr ra0}
${alignc}${execi 1000 cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep 'model name' | sed -e 's/model name.*: //'}
${alignc}$uptime uptime


CPU Load: ${alignr}$cpu%
${cpugraph 20,200 000000 ffffff}
Load averages: ${alignr}$loadavg

Processes: ${alignr}$running_processes of $processes running
Highest CPU usage:
${color yellow} ${top name 1}${alignr}${top cpu 1}
${color}${top name 2}${alignr}${top cpu 2}
${top name 3}${alignr}${top cpu 3}
${top name 4}${alignr}${top cpu 4}
Highest memory usage:
${color yellow} ${top_mem name 1}${alignr}${top_mem mem 1}
${color}${top_mem name 2}${alignr}${top_mem mem 2}
${top_mem name 3}${alignr}${top_mem mem 3}
${top_mem name 4}${alignr}${top_mem mem 4}

Resources:
Memory usage: ${alignr}${memperc}% (${mem}b/${memmax}b)
${membar 3,200}
Swap usage: ${alignr}${swapperc}% (${swap}b/${swapmax}b)
${swapbar 3,200}
HDD free: ${alignr}${fs_free_perc /}% (${fs_free /}b/${fs_size /}b)
${fs_bar 3,200 /}

NET:
Up:${alignr}${upspeed ra0}Kbps, ${totalup ra0}b total
${upspeedgraph ra0 20,200 000000 ffffff}
Down: ${alignr}${downspeed ra0}Kbps, ${totaldown ra0}b total
${downspeedgraph ra0 20,200 000000 ffffff}

The magic happens at these lines:

own_window yes
own_window_transparent yes
own_window_hints undecorated,below,skip_taskbar

That tells conky to run in its own window (which I want, since I want it to be movable), to keep the transparent effect (which I prefer), to set the window to be undecorated (in other words, no handles, borders or menubar), keep it below the other windows and not to put it in a taskbar. I don’t use a panel, as you can see, but I know some other folks do, so I thought I would keep that in there.

There are some downsides, which I leave to you to conquer, since they don’t bother me. First there’s a slight delay updating the background image when you move conky — about the same as the update interval you set in the .conkyrc file. I suppose if you knock down the interval rate, you’ll get a better refresh response.

Second, without window decorations, you can’t directly move conky from one workspace to another. Personally I think I can conquer this with Openbox keybind settings, but since it doesn’t bother me enough, I’ll probably leave it at that.

Have fun. Check out the conky show-off thread here for more ideas.

P.S.: If you cut and paste that text into your .conkyrc file, remember that I use ra0 as my net interface. You might get a lot of zeroes in weird places if you forget to switch it to eth0 or whatever you use. 😉