Arch Linux

kcirick

Member

Registered: 2010-06-21

Posts: 364

Conky or not to conky...

I'm not sure where to ask this question, so I'm starting a new thread.

I'm running DWM, and for status bar, I am currently running conky for the status bar piped into dwm status text using xsetroot (as written on the wiki). So it looks like this:

conky | while read -r; do xsetroot -name "$REPLY"; done &
exec dwm

I can also achieve this using series of bash scripts in a while loop in xinitrc file (also described in the same wiki article).

Which one is generally better? do they make much of a difference? I read the old thread claiming that conky sucks battery, but maybe only because it refreshes the screen (in this case conky is outputting to console, and not to x).

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[My Arch Blog]

Alm

Member

Registered: 2010-09-15

Posts: 64

Re: Conky or not to conky...

If you have a decent amount of data to display in your status bar, conky is probably gonna be faster (and "cleaner") than individual scripts, where you end up spawning multiple processes and piping them through grep/sed/awk.

Last edited by Alm (2011-01-06 17:48:02)

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See, you're unpacking.

markbabc

Member

Registered: 2010-11-06

Posts: 157

Re: Conky or not to conky...

I dont use conky but i recently slimed down the info i displayed in my status bar. i used to have to display if there are new packages and would display the output of a few other python scripts and i did notice alot of different processes so maybe i should have used conky...