ConkyAndGnuScreen

Most of you will already know [GNU Screen][], but did you know that you can use display conky stats in a screen session? Let's see how we can configure conky and screen to display sessions like you see in the screenshot below:

[GNU Screen]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Screen GNU Screen

How to do it

• Install conky and screen (I'm going to skip the details about this 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.)

  out_to_x no out_to_console yes total_run_times 1 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 no out_to_console yes

• 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.