apt-get install

The newest entry in Linux.com’s awesome CLI Magic series reminded me of something I wanted to write about here: Conky! In case you don’t know what it is:

Conky is a lightweight system monitor that provides essential information in an easy-to-understand, highly customizable interface. The software is a fork of TORSMO, which is no longer maintained. Conky monitors your CPU usage, running processes, memory, and swap usage, and other system information, and displays the information as text or as a graph.

Or, if that doesn’t do it for you, think of Conky as a slimmer, trimmer, more configurable gkrellm or adesklets. Conky is text-based, so it is super fast and has a very small footprint. It is also amazingly customizable, as you can get Conky to display the output of any command you can come up with. The end result is some fun, relatively-easy-to-implement eye candy for any desktop.