How to autostart the conky in Xfce

Any application can be autostarted upon boot or you can decide NOT to autostart the applications, that are present there. Find “Session and Startup” in the menu.

First we activate a conky to see that it is working. Then we show where you should add the conky to autostart it. What application should we autostart? Conky,…

We learn the command killall. VERY useful.

We figure out that the command we need is actually am-conky-session and not conky.

We logoff and make sure the conky is started automatically.

Conky’s are in a hidden folder named ~/.config/conky. There you will find a very handy script to get the latest updates.

All conky updates will come in with a package when you update your system.

$

Keyboard Shortcuts To Remember

SUPER + T … CTRL + ALT+ T … Super + Enter

Launch your terminal

r

OPenbox and i3 have their
Own way to launch a conky

General conky info

A conky will NEVER EVER work on all desktops.

There are just too much differences between all the different window managers.

It will also depend on the software you have installed.

There are two versions of the application called ‘conky’.

  1. version 1.9 and earlier – old syntax
  2. version 1.10 and higher  – new syntax – LUA (and old syntax)

We install the application conky-lua-archers (1.10) on ArcoLinux

Options to explore when encountering issues :

  • own_window_type = ‘desktop’,          # options are: normal/override/dock/desktop/panel
  • own_window_transparent = true,     # options are : true and false
  • own_window_argb_visual = true,     # options are : true and false
  • own_window_argb_value = 0,           # options are : 0-255

More information about conkies can be found here :

Arch wiki

Conky github configuration

Conky github faq

Conky github user configs

Conky configuration on sourceforge

Conky variables on sourceforge