How to configure Conky with a GUI-based Conky config tool

Last updated on July 18, 2020 by Dan Nanni

Conky is a light-weight system monitor for X, which displays a variety of information on your desktop. Conky is a highly configurable program which can monitor various time-varying system properties such as CPU load/temperature, free memory, free disk space, battery status, network traffic, etc. Conky consumes little system resources because it renders information within a desktop theme instead of using separate widget toolkits.

The difficult part of using Conky for beginners though is to configure Conky. You need to create a Conky configuration file with properly formatted code, which can sometimes be tricky. That is when a Conky config tool such as Conky Manager comes in handy. Conky Manager is a GUI frontend for managing Conky configuration files. On Conky Manager, you can choose from multiple Conky themes that come with it, customize a chosen theme, and activate a preferred view with a simple mouse click.

Install Conky Manager on Linux

Follow these steps to install the Conky Manager application.

For Ubuntu and Debian:

To install Conky Manager on Debian-based Linux:

sudo apt-add-repository -y ppa:teejee2008/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install conky-manager

Alternatively, OpenSUSE repository provides community package versions of Conky Manager for Debian 9 and 10, and Ubuntu 18.04. Thus you can download any of them and install it.

For Fedora:

On Fedora, you can download an RPM page for Conky Manager from https://fedora.pkgs.org. For example, Conkey Manager for Fedora 32 is found here.

Manage Conky Config Files with Conky Manager

To launch Conky-manager, type the following from the command line.

$ conky-manager

Conky Manager will show you one window with four tabs like below.

Under Theme tab, you can see a list of available Conky themes. To see what a given theme looks like, select the theme, and click on Preview button at the bottom.

To customize a theme, go to Edit tab. Choose the theme you would like to edit in Widget field. You can make an adjustment for location, transparency, window size, time, and network interface.

Under the Options tab, you can set various Conky related options, such as enabling Conky auto-start, adding Conky themes, and killing Conky process.

Here is a screenshot of Conky theme (Conky Seamod) activated by Conky Manager on my desktop.

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