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

The Best New Features of Conky 1.8.0

Back on March 30th, Conky 1.8.0 was officially released! For those of you using Ubuntu 10.04 alpha or beta, you will already be upgraded; for anyone else, you can grab the tarball from the Conky SourceForge site.

While 1.8.0 is primarily a maintenance release, it brings with it a few new features that many users have been after for a while! Notably:

• Conky now supports ARGB transparency, aka "Real" transparency. Until now, Conky has only supported pseudo-transparency, which came with its own quirks. Now you can have a properly see-through Conky (as long as you are running a window manager that support Xorg compositing).
• A command line "pause" flag has been added, so you no longer need a startup script. Many users create a startup script for their Conkys that introduces a delay to loading up Conky so that other processes (for instance, Compiz) can finish loading first. Now you can accomplish the same thing by starting Conky with the -p/--pause flag at startup.
• There's a new alignment type: middle_middle. Now you can have your Conky align to the centre of your screen.
• Lua Cairo bindings now support the cairo_text_extents_t structure. Not fluent in Lua/Cairo yet? Basically, the cairo_text_extents_t structure holds information about Cairo text, and is what makes it possible to manipulate text alignment, e.g. centering, etc.

These are just a taster of the new features; for a full list, have a look at the Conky Wiki. And if you have a great Conky config you'd like to share, do post it here. Don't forget that you can use the Conky Pastebin to save code snippets if you wish.