Window Configuration

Window Configuration Settings

This page is not meant as a full on documentation but provides some general tips and default settings for popular WM/DE.

Generally black flickering may occur, Conky is designed to draw to the root desktop window. However, there are several other applications which like drawing to the root desktop window. Because of this, Conky has two options available to get around this problem:

• You can try enabling double-buffer. Conky's double-buffer option uses the X double-buffer extension to provide a flicker-free Conky. This can be done by adding double_buffer = true to your conky config file. If the double buffer is not working you X11 installation is likely not loading the double buffer extension. Open up the Xorg configuration file (usually /etc/X11/xorg.conf) with your favourite text editor, and find the line that says: Section "Module". Then, after that line, add: Load "dbe", restart Xorg (my preferred method is the good-ole control+alt+backspace) and enjoy.
• Conky can run in windowed mode, meaning that instead of drawing the the root window it draws to it's own window. You can move this window around and resize it by right-clicking or left-clicking on the window while holding down the Alt key. This can be accomplished by running Conky with the '-o' parameter, or by adding the following to your conky config file: own_window = true

Distro specific window configuration

Some distros (WE/DE but i will use disto although it is technically not the right term) are very picky on what window settings (own_window_[foo], see Configurations) Conky uses. Using the wrong settings may cause issues like: wrong window alignment, disappearing conky windows, flickering windows, bugged transparency, no click-through, hidden desktop short-cuts, ect... since this may be confusing for new users or annoying when changing distos this page gives some distro specific tips and default window settings which should work. Keep in mind the given settings may be altered by your preference (eg. transparency level) and are just a starting point. Feel free to expand this page with your favourite distro (or alternative settings) to help people getting started with conky!

Cinnamon

Is rather picky, these settings should work (enabling transparency):

    -- ------------------------- Windows Settings
    own_window = true,
    own_window_type = 'normal',
    own_window_transparent = false,
    own_window_hints = 'undecorated,sticky,below,skip_taskbar,skip_pager',
    own_window_argb_visual = true,
    own_window_argb_value = 192,

    double_buffer = true,

by changing own_window_argb_value you can alter the transparency. This does not offer click through behaviour (icons behind conky windows can not be selected/opened). To enable this feature your have to build conky with build flag BUILD_XSHAPE=ON, to see if your conky installation is build with this option check your conky -v output and search for XSHAPE under X11. If unavailable you have to recompile conky with said build flag enabled.

Possible issues:

• Black flickering may occur on transparent conky windows. This is caused by a design decision in Gnome (on which cinnamon is build) which has a black root window instead of the set background image [source needed]. Currently there is no work around (gnome "issue").
• If you have got an alignment issue, everything draws on the left, make sure the option 'Disable workarounds' is disabled, see issue. To disable this option use: gsettings set org.cinnamon.desktop.wm.preferences disable-workarounds false, thanks to SethDusek for solving this issue.

GNU screen

Conky can be configured to display stats in a screen session GNU Screen.

Steps:

• Install conky and screen (details are skipped because this depends on your distribution).

• Check if your conky is compiled with or without X11 support by running conky -v, if you see a line that mentions "X11" then you have X11 support. If you don't have it, don't panic : not having X11 support is even better in this case!

• You will need to create a second conkyconfiguration for screen, a good place for it is in your homedir, so create the file /home/USERNAME/.conkyinscreen and place the following in it: (do not remove total_run_times 1 because screen will do the refreshing, not conky.)

conky.config = {
    out_to_x = false,
    out_to_console = true,
    total_run_times = 1
};
conky.text = [[${time %H:%M}|free space:${fs_free /}|$loadavg|free mem:$memeasyfree]]

If you don't have X11 support, remove the lines:

    out_to_x = false,
    out_to_console = true,

• Replace the last line with another configuration to show things that you want to see BUT MAKE SURE IT FITS ON 1 LINE!

• Go to your homedir and create the file .screenrc with the following contents: (check the docs about screen if you want to tweak it)

    hardstatus on
    backtick 1 5 5 conky -c /home/USERNAME/.conkyinscreen
    hardstatus alwayslastline "%=%1`"

• Try running screen and see if it works, conky should refresh every 5 seconds and it should display at the right-bottom corner.

Awesome 4.0

Under the default configuration, awesome-wm doesn't draw other windows over the conky, which then takes a lot of screen estate. For conky to go to the background, use :

    own_window = true,
    own_window_type = 'override',

(as with own_window = false, the conky simply does not appear).