The Conky Blog The Official Blog for Conky, a Lightweight System Monitor

Q & A with Conky’s Main Dev, Brenden Matthews

I've been working with Conky now for the better part of a year, which, I'll admit, makes me a bit of a latecomer to this game! This was my first ever screenshot, and my first foray into the wonder that is desktop customisation with Conky:

From Screenshots

If you know me at all, I think you'd agree that I have since fallen deep in love with Conky, so when Conky's main developer, Brenden Matthews, agreed to answer a few questions for me, I jumped at the chance!

Q: How did Conky get started? I know that it was a "fork of Torsmo", but I'm not too familiar with Torsmo. Were you originally involved in that project? And if not, how did you come to inherit it and move it on to become Conky?

Brenden Matthews: Conky started when I created a patch for torsmo (to add data smoothing, i.e. sample averaging such as cpu_avg_samples) and received no feedback after submitting it. I also noticed a lack of activity with the project in general, and impulsively decided to fork the project. In some ways Conky hasn't changed much since torsmo, but it has evolved to something much more rich and more capable.

Q: How did you decide on the name Conky? I know it's named after that doll on Trailer Park Boys, but is that it, it just sounded cool? Or does it hold some special significance to you?

BM: I've been a big fan of the TV show for many years, and Conky was one of my favourite characters.

Q: How many developers are there now, and where are they located?

BM: There are a huge number of contributors to Conky. Many of them are one-off contributors, but the majority of the work is done by people who make regular contributions (and have done so for years). I don't want to list off anyone in particular for fear of leaving someone out, but if anyone is curious you can always check the git log (at http://git.omp.am/?p=conky.git;a=shortlog).

Q: How do you decide which features to add to Conky (e.g. an $rss variable as opposed to just letting people use $exec curl)?

BM: Things just sort of evolve. Usually I don't write many new features myself, as I have long since added all the stuff I had a personal interest in. Most of the work I do now is bug fixes and adding new patches (which usually requires a bit of tweaking). Often people submit patches which either duplicate efforts or are very similar to existing components, so I have to separate the parts that I want from those I don't.

For example, with the $curl object, we already had RSS support (which used curl) and later somebody added weather support (which also used curl). So, I refactored the code so that the curl, RSS, and weather parts were all separate components, and thus wound up with the $curl object.

Q: Which is your favourite feature in Conky?

BM: I really like the built in IMAP client with IDLE support. It's also probably one of the most under-utilized features of Conky (though I admit it can be tricky to set up). Then again, I might be biased, since I wrote all that code.

For a little background, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMAP_IDLE

Q: What does the future of Conky look like? Or perhaps, what can we look forward to in Conky 2.0?

BM: Good question. There are some things about Conky I want to stay as they are, but some things need to change. For example, the current conkyrc syntax has to go, which probably won't make a lot of people happy (since their old configs won't work). I'm also quite happy about the Lua integration, but it still needs improvement. I want to expose more of the Conky internals via the Lua API, but this requires a bit of an internal Conky rewrite first. I'd also like to add some additional output and input options (i.e., drawing to multiple windows, receiving data from multiple remote Conky processes).

And of course, I'd like to add proper XRender support (which means proper transparency on composited X). Patches for this have been submitted already--I just haven't reviewed them yet. I need to stop slacking

The concept of a "Conky 2.0" has been around for a while (and I even began rewriting the code from scratch at one point), but there really isn't anything Conky doesn't already do that I want it to do.

Q: What do you do for a day job? Assuming it's not Conky!

BM: Conky as a day job would certainly be nice--but no, I have a normal job like everyone else. I work for a small wireless software/service company in Berkeley, California. I write code and drink coffee most of the day, and in my spare time I enjoy cycling (I happen to live car-free) and being outdoors in general.

Q: Some of us users out there have started to use the term "CCCC", for the "Creative Collaborative Conky Community". What do you think of that epithet?

BM: I think it's great that I've been a part of something that people find useful (and possibly entertaining). Some of my coworkers even use Conky--but I don't think they know I'm responsible for it. The fact that a community has sprung up around Conky is great and I hope that I can continue to make Conky suck less with every release.