Conky/Tips and tricks

Display package update information

pacman-contrib provides a script called checkupdates which displays package updates from the official repos. Use ${execi 3600 checkupdates | wc -l} to display the total number of packages.

tail text files

conky is able to conky(1) § tail files to your desktop, which is mostly useful for text files. Such as reading /var/log/ files to display all kinds of log messages. Most of these files can only be read by root, but running conky as root is not recommended, so you will need to add yourself to the log user group. In addition, since systemd log files are binary files, this feature is less useful then it used to be. However, it could be accomplished using lua scripts.

Display weather forecast

It is achieved by reading external web pages, usually pages dedicated to weather forecast. See this thread. Another weather script in lua: here

Display a countdown timer

ConkyTimer is a simple countdown timer that displays the remaining time of a defined task.

Start the timer using .

Display RSS feeds

Conky has the ability to display RSS feeds natively without the need for an outside script to run and output into Conky. For example, to display the titles of the ten most recent Planet Arch updates and refresh the feed every minute, you would put this into your in the section:

${rss https://planet.archlinux.org/rss20.xml 300 item_titles 10 }

If you want to display Arch Forum rss feed, add this line:

${rss https://bbs.archlinux.org/extern.php?action=feed&type=rss 300 item_titles 4}

where 300 is in seconds the refresh interval (15 minutes is default), 4 the number of items you wish to show.

Display a calendar for the current month

You can use the following lua script to display a calendar. It uses and the default color from your configuration. It looks best with a monospace font.

 #!/usr/bin/env lua
 
 conky_color = "${color1}%2d${color}"
 
 t = os.date('*t', os.time())
 year, month, currentday = t.year, t.month, t.day
 
 daystart = os.date("*t",os.time{year=year,month=month,day=01}).wday
 
 month_name = os.date("%B")
 
 days_in_month = {
     31, 28, 31, 30, 31, 30, 
     31, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31
 }
 
 -- check for leap year
 -- Any year that is evenly divisible by 4 is a leap year
 -- Any year that is evenly divisible by 100 is a leap year if
 -- it is also evenly divisible by 400.
 LeapYear = function (year)
     return year % 4 == 0 and (year % 100 ~= 0 or year % 400 == 0)
 end
 
 if LeapYear(year) then
     days_in_month[2] = 29
 end
 
 title_start = (20 - (string.len(month_name) + 5)) / 2
 
 title = string.rep(" ", math.floor(title_start+0.5)) .. -- add padding to center the title
         (" %s %s\n Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa\n"):format(month_name, year)
 
 io.write(title)
 
 function seq(a,b)
     if a > b then
         return
     else
         return a, seq(a+1,b)
     end 
 end
 
 days = days_in_month[month]
 
 io.write(
     string.format(
         string.rep("   ", daystart-1) ..
         string.rep(" %2d", days), seq(1,days)
     ):gsub(string.rep(".",21),"%0\n")
      :gsub(("%2d"):format(currentday),
            (conky_color):format(currentday)
      ) .. "\n"
 )

Inside your you can then place the following, making sure the path matches where you saved the script.

 conky.text = [[
 ${execpi 3600 ~/.config/conky/cal.lua}
 ]]

Display rTorrent stats

See this thread.

Display your WordPress blog stats

This can be achieved by using the in python written extension named ConkyPress.

Display number of new emails

Conky has built in support for IMAP and POP3, but does not have support for access over ssl. Conky's FAQ recommends using stunnel for this and has an example configuration here.

Modify as follows, and then start :

1. Service-level configuration for TLS server

[imap]
client = yes
accept  = 143
connect = imap.gmail.com:143
protocol = imap
sslVersion = TLSv1
# Service-level configuration for SSL server
[imaps]
client = yes
accept  = 993
connect = imap.gmail.com:993

Then add the following to :

conky.config = {
    imap = "localhost username password [-i 120] [-f 'inbox'] [-p 993]",
}

conky.text {
    Inbox: ${imap_unseen}/${imap_messages}
}

Gmail

If you use 2-factor authentication, you need to use an App Password.

For method 1, 2 and 3:

Create one of the following files in a convenient location (for example in ~/.scripts/).

Then add the following string to your in order the check your Gmail account for new email every five minutes (300 seconds) and display:

${execi 300 python ~/.scripts/gmail.py}

method 1

This script uses retrieves the number of new email via Gmail's Atom API.

method 2

Same as method 1, but does proper XML parsing.

method 3

The same way, but with using , and :

replace email and password with your data.

IMAP + SSL using Perl

Conky has built in support for IMAP accounts but does not support SSL. This can be provided using this script from this forum post. This requires the Perl/CPAN Modules Mail::IMAPClient and IO::Socket::SSL which are in the perl-mail-imapclient and packages

Create a file named in a location to be read by conky (for example in ~/.scripts/). In this file, add (with the appropriate changes):

Add to :

${execi 300 ~/.scripts/imap.pl} 

or wherever you saved the file.

If you use Gmail you might need to generate an application specific password.

Alternatively, you can use stunnel as shown above: #Gmail

IMAP using PHP

Another alternative using PHP. PHP needs to be installed and must be uncommented in /etc/php/php.ini.

Then create a file named in a location to be read by conky (for example in ~/.scripts/). Make the file executable.

In this file, add (with the appropriate changes):

Add to :

${execi 300 ~/.scripts/imap.php} 

or wherever you saved the file.

This script displays A/B where A is the number of unseen emails and B is the total number of mails in the mailbox. There are a lot of other information available through a lot of PHP functions like with imap_Status (https://php.net/manual/function.imap-status.php). Just see the PHP docs about IMAP: https://php.net/manual/ref.imap.php.

Show graphic of active network interface

To test if a network inferface is currently active, you can use the test conky variable on the of the interface. Here is an example for wlo1 :

This is the expected result :

https://i.imgur.com/pQQbsP6.png

User-contributed configuration examples

• A sample rings script with nvidia support - gist