[xmonad] Using conky as the main status bar -- possible?

[Mikael Puhakka]

On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 19:33, Konstantin Sobolev
<konstantin.sobolev at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi
>
>> I haven't figured out how conky takes stdin. I can't find from the
>> documents anything about outputting stdin stream, there are no
>> variables[1] for that. I should have taken this to Conky's mailing
>> lists first, but as I recall someone used conky with xmonad well. I
>> couldn't find the post from archives, but maybe somebody pops up.
>
> I'm using conky as a statusbar, you can see it here:
> http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Image:ComboP.png
> I found only one way to show messages there: using files. For example
> here's my urgency handling code:
>
> myPP = PP { ppCurrent           = const ""
>          , ppVisible           = const ""
>          , ppHidden            = map toUpper
>          , ppHiddenNoWindows   = const ""
>          , ppUrgent            = map toLower
>          , ppSep               = ""
>          , ppWsSep             = " "
>          , ppTitle             = const ""
>          , ppLayout            = const ""
>          , ppOrder             = id
>          , ppSort              = getSortByIndex
>          , ppExtras            = []
>          , ppOutput            = printUrgency
>          }
>
> printUrgency :: String -> IO ()
> printUrgency s = do
>    h <- openFile "/home/kos/.conky/urgent" WriteMode
>    hPutStrLn h (filter isLower s)
>    hClose h
>
> (upper/lower case is a dumb way to filter out everything except
> urgency messages)
>
> and then in conkyrc:
>
> ${execi 5 cat /home/kos/.conky/urgent}
>
> I made a more versatile system on my laptop, with a single globally
> writable /tmp/message file. Anything written to it is shown for 5
> seconds in my conky. Mostly used for messages like "laptop mode on",
> "wifi off", "LCD brightness 60%" written by udev/ACPI scripts
>

Now that looks pretty! I had in my fluxbox days a terminal with "tail
-f" messages, perhaps I'll incorporate a similar functionality to conky.
It seems that I have to invest in Lua or a module in C to make conky
react more frequently than once per 1 second to show window titles and
workspaces.

... and perhaps I can live with the small xmobar bar since conky is
said to eat a lot more if it constantly reads files.

Thanks for your working suggestion anyway!

--Mikael