Lean Conky Config

Lean Conky Config (LCC) is, well, a lean Conky config that just works.

Features

• Simple: works out of the box, automatically discovers devices (storage, network etc.), resizable to fit any screen resolution with a single config
• Elegant: clean, sleek and functional layout
• Customizable: pick the components you need to build the panel, change colors and fonts the way you like
• Extensible: modular component system, template-based, easy to extend

Installation

LCC works with Conky 1.10.0 or above. If you haven't, install Conky first. On Ubuntu/Debian:

sudo apt install conky

For other operating systems, refer to Conky documentation.

You can find the latest release of LCC here, to install just download the package and decompress it into a directory of your choice. If you want to try the current dev version, download this file instead, or clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/jxai/lean-conky-config [/path/to/lean-conky-config]

If ~/.config/conky doesn't exist yet, you may simply use that path which is the default for Conky config.

It is recommended to install the LCC font, but that is optional.

How to Run

Start Conky/LCC by:

/path/to/lean-conky-config/start-lcc.sh

In a few seconds you should see the panel showing up, docked to the right side your desktop. If you have multiple monitors, the panel should appear on one of them.

If there are Conky instances running already, the LCC script will terminate them first. The script is selective and only kills processes started by itself.

Use AppImage or a custom Conky binary

You might have installed Conky as an AppImage or built it from source, and the binary is not at a standard location. If it is the only Conky installation, you might simply symlink to it from system paths (e.g. ~/.local/bin or /usr/local/bin). In case you have multiple Conky executables and want a specific one for LCC to use, start it this way:

/path/to/lean-conky-config/start-lcc.sh -p /path/to/your/conky

Conky releases AppImage packages officially, give it a try if a more recent version is preferred. For instance, if the network meters show nothing, you might need v1.17 or above.

Auto-start

In order to auto-start Conky on Ubuntu, follow this tutorial, replacing Command with the start-lcc.sh command line you have run successfully (note that you need to specify the full path to the script). For other desktop environments, check the information here.

Enable/disable LCC font

You might have noticed the icons and LCD-style time in the screenshot above. LCC renders them with a custom font named LeanConkyConfig, which is automatically installed in your local font directory (~/.local/share/fonts) when LCC starts. If you don't see the font in effect, likely your desktop environment doesn't load it properly. In this case you can manually install the font, located at font/lean-conky-config.otf. This is optional though. LCC is designed to just work, it would fall back gracefully instead of breaking the layout, even if the font is not loaded by the system.

In case you prefer the plain font and simple layout, here's a workaround to disable the LCC font:

/path/to/lean-conky-config/font/install -u && \
touch ~/.local/share/fonts/lean-conky-config.otf

And to re-enable it:

/path/to/lean-conky-config/font/install -f

Automatic device discovery

Unlike many other Conky configs out there, LCC works out of the box. It automatically discover network interfaces and mounted disks, so you don't have to manually configure them. Moreover, it monitors device changes. When WiFi is toggled, the NETWORK section is dynamically updated; and when you plug/unplug USB drives, DISK USAGE will reflect almost instantly.

Customization

While LCC is made to work out of the box, it is also designed to serve your needs for customization. To get started, create your local configuration file local.conf:

cp local.conf.example local.conf

and make changes there (instead of directly in conky.conf), this way your custom settings wouldn't get lost when LCC itself is updated.

Scale to fit your screen

In a plain Conky config, layout parameters (voffset and goto values, font sizes etc.) are hard-coded, making it difficult to adapt to different screen resolutions. When you try a new config from the web, you might find it to appear too large or too small on your desktop, and have to manually adjust many parameters, rather tedious work.

LCC addresses this issue elegantly. To globally scale the panel while preserving the layout, simply change the lcc.config.scale variable in your local.conf, a value larger than 1 magnifies the LCC panel to fit a monitor of higher resolution.

Under the hood, LCC achieves this by offering a few transform functions (defined in tform.lua), which you can apply to numerical values that need to be changed on-the-fly:

• T_.sr: scale and round to the nearest integer, suitable for most use cases where an integer value is required.
• T_.sc: scale to a floating-point number, suitable for situations where precise sizing is desired, e.g. font size.
• T_.sh: scale to a multiple of 0.5 (half), might be useful in case such an option is needed.

For values embedded in a string, wrap them with $sr{}/$sc{} and tranform the whole string with the T_ function, e.g.:

font = T_ "sans-serif:normal:size=$sc{8}"

Pick your favorite colors and fonts

Colors can be customized through standard Conky settings.

To make it easy to customize fonts, LCC implements a named fonts mechanism. Fonts for different elements are defined in the lcc.fonts table.

Check local.conf.example to see how various settings can be customized. For a full reference, dig conky.conf.

Components

LCC is modular. The panel consists of components which you can freely pick and organize. Currently the following core components are available:

• datetime
• system
• cpu
• memory
• storage
• network

To include any of them, add an entry in the lcc.panel table, e.g.:

{ "<component>", [<arg1>, <arg2>, ...] },

If no arguments are required, the entry can just be a string:

"<component>",

Check local.conf.example for examples. You might notice a special component vspace, which is used to trim the trailing panel space at the bottom. It can also insert a vertical spacing if a positive height is given.

GPU support

LCC comes with a component supporting Nvidia GPUs, gpu.nvidia, which is not enabled by default (because not every system is equipped with an Nvidia GPU). To enable it, add a gpu.nvidia entry to lcc.panel.

Under the hood, gpu.nvidia has two backends. The preferred one depends on Python and pynvml, and you need to install that package first, e.g.:

pip install pynvml

If the pynvml backend doesn't work, gpu.nvidia falls back to a backend offered by Conky itself, which is less powerful. In case your Conky was not compiled with nvidia support, an error message would show up in the LCC panel.

Customize storage mountpoints

In the STORAGE section, LCC by default shows mountpoints from local filesystems most commonly found on major Linux distros. In case you don't see some of your drives, or on the other hand would rather hide certain mountpoints, LCC offers several configurable options in lcc.config to help you:

• storage_include_fs: Extra filesystem types to show, specified as a comma-separated string e.g. "cifs,nfs". To find the supported types, you may check /proc/filesystems or /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/kernel/fs.
• storage_exclude_fs: Filesystems you want to hide, a comma-separated string e.g. "fat,ntfs".
• storage_exclude_paths: An array of Lua patterns matching specific mountpoints you want to hide. If a mountpoint matches any of the patterns it won't show up. Check local.conf.example.

More Information

Check official Conky documentation:

• Configuration Settings
• Objects/Variables

In fact, the man page might provide more up-to-date information for the Conky version installed on your system:

man -P "less -p 'CONFIGURATION SETTINGS'" conky
man -P "less -p 'OBJECTS/VARIABLES'" conky

Also, here is a great third-party reference with examples.