Square text conky

I had an idea for a conky. I wanted it to be extremely compact and involve text in different orientations. This is what I ended up with!



The problem was that I spent a long time looking for a square font. I found several fonts that I liked but when I came to rotate them and put rotated letters next to regularly orientated letters I found that none of the fonts were actually square. Non were the same width as height.

So I decided to make my own font using the Lua script. I had done something similar in my ascii text lua; a function that read each letter of the text I wanted displayed and converted the letter into ascii.

In this case I created my own square font out of the webdings font. With webdings a "g" gave me a solid color square, while "c" gave me a black square with a color outline. I simply constructed my letters using those blocks like so:

if letter=="T" then
font="webdings"
acrosst=across
downt=down
rotate=rotate*math.pi/180
cairo_translate (cr, acrosst, downt)
cairo_rotate (cr, rotate)
cairo_select_font_face (cr, font, CAIRO_FONT_SLANT_NORMAL, CAIRO_FONT_WEIGHT_NORMAL);
cairo_set_font_size (cr, fontsize);
cairo_set_source_rgba (cr, red, green, blue, alpha);
cairo_move_to (cr, 0, 0);
cairo_show_text (cr, "ggggg")
ldown=fontsize
cairo_move_to (cr, 0, ldown);
cairo_show_text (cr, "ccgcc")
ldown=fontsize+ldown
cairo_move_to (cr, 0, ldown);
cairo_show_text (cr, "ccgcc")
ldown=fontsize+ldown
cairo_move_to (cr, 0, ldown);
cairo_show_text (cr, "ccgcc")
ldown=fontsize+ldown
cairo_move_to (cr, 0, ldown);
cairo_show_text (cr, "ccgcc")
cairo_rotate (cr, -1*rotate)
cairo_translate (cr, -1*acrosst, -1*downt)
end

I actually really like the look of the resulting square "font". And everything fitted nicely together with no gaps :)

Go here to take a look at the code via the link. This is another really long script, mainly because of the letter conversion function. Originally I set up the function converting lowercase letters into upper case letters of the square font. But I didn't like the way they looked, so I re-wrote the letter conversion function to include converting uppercase letters to a different version of the square font.

I just used the lua command string.upper to make everything uppercase and fed it to the conversion function. I never bothered to delete the lowercase conversion lines :)

Final Fantsy VII

I am a big final fantasy 7 fan, so when rabidofx posted a FF7 themed conky, I immediately thought of the potential to turn the FF7 bottom combat panel into a conky display.

And this is what I eventually came up with!



I have tried to be as faithful as I can to the FF7 panel while still allowing the conky to function as a source of information.

It still needs some work and the script needs a good cleanup and improvements to make it more user friendly. You can get the code here at conky-pitstop! Or here on the crunchbanglinux forum. While your on the forum check out rabidfox's post directly above. He has modified ADcomps Adeskbar to look like materia slots (very nice!).

So why does it take 2200 lines of lua code to produce my FF7 panel conky?
Well 3 reasons... first because it's just a little messy. A lot of copying and pasting went on and I'm sure that I could comb through it an eliminate a large number of supurflouous lines :)

Second drawing in lua with the cairo library takes a lot of lines. To draw the blue shaded rectangles required this:

sa=5
sd=5
rh=120
rw=280
red=1
green=1
blue=1
alpha=1
pat = cairo_pattern_create_linear (sa, sd, rh, rw)
cairo_pattern_add_color_stop_rgba (pat, 0, red-1, green-1, blue, alpha)
cairo_pattern_add_color_stop_rgba (pat, 1, red-1, green-1, blue-1, alpha)
cairo_set_source (cr, pat)
cairo_rectangle (cr, sa, sd, rw, rh)
cairo_fill (cr)

I could have used less lines and specified the positions and colors etc in the actual pattern and drawing lines, but this way is just so much easier for fine tuning. I set the colors up like this becasue I kept forgetting which number represented what in the cairo_set_pattern lines! :)

The grey border around the blue was also line intensive.

Reason 3, and perhaps the main reason for the length of the script is the way you have to use cairo to display text. And if you look closely you will see that every piece of text has a black "shadow" ...which is simply the same piece of text, colored black and printed behind and offset a little.

font="Acknowledge TT (BRK)"
text=topl1
fsize=20
red=0
green=0
blue=0
alpha=1
across=32
down=22
cairo_select_font_face (cr, font, CAIRO_FONT_SLANT_NORMAL, CAIRO_FONT_WEIGHT_NORMAL);
cairo_set_font_size (cr, fsize);
cairo_set_source_rgba (cr, red, green, blue, alpha);
cairo_move_to (cr, across, down);
cairo_show_text (cr, text)
red=0.8
green=0.8
blue=0.8
alpha=1
across=across-2
down=down-2
cairo_set_source_rgba (cr, red, green, blue, alpha);
cairo_move_to (cr, across, down);
cairo_show_text (cr, text)

So I had to set the font, set the font size, set the red, green, blue and alpha, set the position, write the font, fontsize and color setup lines, move cairo to the coordinates and then tell it to diaplay the text. That gave me the shadow, then I had to change the color and position, set up the text drawing variables and draw the main text.

I kept this format throughout the script, so i could easily change colors and positions without wading through a sea of setup lines.

Here is my latest conky configuration

conkybar!

and this is what it looks like currently:



Nothing out of the ordinary in terms of content over many other conkyrc generated displays.

But with a few differences.

The first thing is that every is generated in a lua script. The second is that those black triangles at the top are clickable buttons. Here is how this setup functions.



A while ago on the crunchbanglinux website a poster by the name of jpope had a wallpaper that had a large power button right in the middle of the screen. Here is the post:
http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/post/45907/#p45907

ADcomp had written a python script to place a button on the desktop that would launch a command or script. The button could be placed anywhere and you could make your own icons for it to use and it could execute any command when you click it. It was all set up in the script.

I thought that was pretty cool and I stored it in the back of my mind.

Then recently I started looking into the file io function of lua, the ability to open files in the lua script, read their contents and store that as strings which could be manipulated in the script. I had been working on some bash scripts using curl to download information from webpages, then editing the html to pull out specific pieces of information.

I had been using the conky_parse command in lua to execute the bash scripts via conky, but I was trying to bring some of the operations into the native lua language to make the scripts run a little lighter cpu wise.

However, once I started playing around with the file io commands I realised that I could affect the whole lua script by having the script "watching" a text file and then editing the file, initially via a terminal command.

something like this:
$ touch /tmp/setw.txt; echo "1" > /tmp/setw.txt

the touch command creates the file then the > writes a "1" into the file.
a similar command could then easily ovewrite the "1" with a "2"

so if i had the Lua script watching that file I could put the output into a string and use the string as a basis for an if statement.

These are the lines that watch the text files in the lua script

wread = io.open("/home/mcdowall/conkyset/wset.txt", "r")
wset = wread:read("*lines")

I've changed the names and moved the files out of /tmp so they are persistant.

So now a simple:

if wset=="1" then
--display one thing--
end

if wset=="2" then
--display something else--
end

gives me interactive control over the script.

I then remembered the button script I had seen, and after some searching (and asking) I had the link to the script.

take a look at this entry on the ubuntu conky thread for more infomation on how the interaction works.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=9826304&postcount=13840

The actual lua script can be found here. It is still very much a work in progress.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=9830734&postcount=13855

The fact that everything has to be constructed in lua was itself a challenge. Lua doesn't have all the goodies pre-programmed into it like the objects you can get in a conkyrc by putting in the right command

The calendars were tricky. I saw londonali1010's post on lua calendars here
http://mylittledesktop.blogspot.com/2009/10/argh-my-first-snag-with-my-lovely.html

I looked over her code and borrowed a couple of lines (for calculating start day), but went about contructing the calendar in a very different way. The result was a calendar that looked very similar to the one available through a conkyrc. I'm still trying to perfect the day indicator however.

The biggest limitation to using Lua to construct a complete conky output is how it handles displaying text. It takes a lot of lines to get the tables you see in my output, far more than if I were to do the same thing in a straight conkyrc.

Anyway, I'm still working on the content of the conky but I am happy how the mechanics have worked out!

As it stands right now this setup is no more cpu draining than my regular all conkyrc setup. And when I have all the sections rolled up (except system monitor so that I can see the cpu usage) it runs much lighter. When a section is "rolled up" or inactive the lua script does not have to do any of the calculations or rendering for that section.

Animated text conky.
Here is a concept for a conky that I have been thinking about for a while.




having the text in conky appear as if it were being typed.

The idea came a while back when I was thinking about how to get a better scroll function in conky, and I was working on a matrix rain themed conky. I thought it would be cool if you could get text in conky to appear like the text that appeared on Neo's computer in the movie.

I just hadn't done anything about it till now.

Thanks go to iggykoopa of the crunchbanglinux forum for his help with coding. Other wise the script would be very difficult to change. Now you can set up the script to display any text you like, when you like and where you like. It's still a bit tricky as you have to work out your timings for each section of text to appear, pause and vanish.

I have set it up so that you get the impression that a program is runing inside of conky, scanning your system and fetching the information.

You can get the code on the crunchbang linux forum here.

My latest conky plots the position of the sun throughout the day. The Lua script also calculates and displays the sun's altitude and azimuth as it changes throughout the day. I had to get to grips with some equations and also get to grips with how to do those calculations in Lua.

The conky has 2 scripts that make it work.
Firstly there is a bash script that uses the curl function to access a webpage. Then using grep, awk and sed I extracted key astronomical data from the page.

The Lua script is then fed the data via conky and uses the numbers to perform all the necessary calculations. I also display a range of data in the conky via the Lua script.




The figure is all based on equations which are in turn based on the data I gathered. The figure shows a very accurate representation of the position of the sun relative to the horizon.

You can get the code for the bash and Lua script on the crunchbang linux website here.

If you are interested in using this conky then be sure to read my post as you will have to make some changes to the scripts regarding geographical location.

Here is a new conky/lua setup from me.

This is based on a wallpaper created by the ever talented gutterslob which he posted on the crunchbang linux website here.

This was posted back in March and I said at the time that it would make a great conky but I never went any further than that. Then recently I saw someone else on the crunchbang site post a screenshot using the wallpaper and, as I had some time to kill, I started making a conky display based upon it.

This is how it turned out (everything is labeled in the picture)



The code is on the crunchbang website here.
The code is ugly, overlong, overcomplicated and far from user friendly. The Lua script is an amalgamation of bits of previous lua scripts with modifications but I have yet to go through the code and clean it up.

There are some innovations. I think my clock turned out quite nicely and I haven't seen a clock like that before. I also liked the idea of a wordless/numberless figure (which this is)

Also my upspeed and downspeed bars, while seemingly simple, display speed as a percentage of total possible speed (determined via speed testing). The lua script can differentiate between bytes, kilobytes and megabytes per second (that is output by the conky object upspeed for example) and calculate speed in a single unit which makes this possible.

I haven't been very active conky wise lately and it looks like I won't be able to spend much time in the future on conky/Lua tinkering either.

I have projects that are going to be keeping me busy. But hopefully I will have a few hours here and there to play!

I've still got lots of good ideas about things to do with Lua/cairo scripts, but as the scripts get more complicated they also take longer to write and test.

I guess I'm entering a mostly retired state as far as conky goes.