Conky GIF widget on GNOME

Introduction

Conky is a highly configurable system monitor for Linux. It can display various information on your desktop in a visually appealing way, from system stats to weather updates. I recently created a custom widget for Conky that I’m excited to share with you.

Gnome VS KDE widgets

KDE is known for its powerful customization options and rich feature set. It offers a different approach to widgets while GNOME is known for its simplicity,clean interface and takes a minimalist approach to widgets.

That’s why most GNOME users uses other third party software like Conky for their widgets

Conky GIF

By default Conky doesn’t support GIF widgets but I found a workaround That I want to share with you.

The science behind the magic

We simply extract the frames of the GIF and loop over these frames, every time we loop over a frame it is copied to a temp folder where the conky config file points to, then the frame number keeps incrementing so the loop continues forever

#!/bin/zsh

cd ~/.conky/Conky\ GIF/pix
n_frames=$(ls | wc -l)
filename=$(ls -lsv | head -n 2 | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $10}')
convert -format png -resize 160x120 $filename /dev/shm/current.png
number=$(echo "${filename}" | grep -o -E "[0-9]+")
base_name="frame"
new_number=$(echo $((number+n_frames)))
new_filename="${base_name}-${new_number}.png"
mv $filename $new_filename

Make sure You have Conky installed on your machine

sudo apt-get install conky-all

Then refer to this github repo for the widget code

Conclusion

I hope you find this Conky widget useful and that it enhances your desktop experience. Feel free to share your feedback and suggestions for improvements. If you encounter any issues, don’t hesitate to reach out for support.

Happy Conky-ing!