Configure Conky and feh on i3 Desktop

As I have mentioned on other posts and and shown the pic of my desktop, there are a couple of programs I need to explain how to configure. One is the Conky setup, with the i3wm command list on the desktop transparently, and the second is the feh that i use to set up the wallpaper on the desktop.

Now I will be the first to admit, I am not a fanatic about wallpapers. Most time I have my apps covering the entire screen, so I don't see the wallpaper a lot. But, just to make my desktop look nice, and to give a background to the conky setup, I put a wallpaper on mine. The program I use do to this is called feh. It is a small program to manage wallpapers, and i3 will use it if it is installed. I have a pretty simple setup, in that I created a directory in my home folder named backgrounds. In that directory I put whatever file I want to be the background. If I don't want it to rotate through each picture in that directory with each reboot, I only put one file in there. If I put 20 files it would rotate through each picture changing with each boot. Below is the config line that you put in your profile to make this work, obviously after installing feh.

Install and configure feh

For Debian
# sudo apt install feh

For FreeBSD
# sudo pkg install feh

Now create your backgrounds directory
# mkdir ~/backgrounds

now edit your /home/$USERNAME/.profile and add the following line
# feh --randomize --bg-fill ~/backgrounds/*

Now, obviously, go find yourself a background on the internet, or a pic you like of your kids, or whatever your thing is and copy the file into the backgrounds directory. Once you logout and log back in, you should see your pic as the background. Now i am using the most basic of feh settings, and there are a ton of other tweaks to feh you can do. Here is a couple of sites with feh info if you want to dig in way further than I did.

Project website for feh on github
feh Github site

A site that has a lot of the switches and commands consolidated and easy to follow
Bristol Watch feh config how-to

Conky Config

Now the Conky config is a little more involved than setting up feh. A couple of years ago I tried Manjaro i3 Community edition. I like Manjaro if you are going down the Arch/pacman rabbit hole. Nothing wrong with it. But I was blown away with the out of the box setup that had the conky files running on all desktops transparently to show the background. I had to put it on a usb drive, boot it, and dig through the configs to find out how to set it up myself. This blog is about how to set that up.

Now there are some files that I have looked for and the ONLY place I have found these conky files is ON the Manjaro i3 edition. Maybe these files exist some other place, but i have yet to find out where to download them. Here is a link to download the zip file of all of the conky files:

Manjaro Conky setup files

Now, I am sure there are multiple ways to set these up. I looked through them and you will see there is multiple verisons of them, different layouts and different colors. Play with all of them to see what one you like, I chose the maia verison. Here is a list of the files that are in the above tarball:

* /usr/bin/conky_green
* /usr/bin/conky_grey
* /usr/bin/conky_solarized
* /usr/bin/start_conky_green
* /usr/bin/start_conky_grey
* /usr/bin/start_conky_live_green
* /usr/bin/start_conky_live_grey
* /usr/bin/start_conky_live_maia
* /usr/bin/start_conky_live_solarized
* /usr/bin/start_conky_maia
* /usr/share/conky/conky_maia
* /usr/share/conky/conky_shortcuts_live_green
* /usr/share/conky/conky_shortcuts_live_grey
* /usr/share/conky/conky_shortcuts_live_maia
* /usr/share/conky/conky_shortcuts_live_solarized

And you can see where I put these files. The ones in /usr/bin need to be make excecutable with:

_ # sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/conky_*

Now, you could always put them in a unique directory, make them executable, then add that directory to the path on your system. I took the easy way out and put them in the /usr/bin directory. You pick what you are comfortable with, and the only two requirements is that they are executable, and in the path so they can be found when called.

Here is the line, mentioned also in the i3 configure blog, that gets put in the config file for i3:

# exec --no-startup-id start_conky_maia

Obviously, you can change the start_conky_ to whichever of the above you like. This is simply MY setup and what I use at this moment, subject to change wihtout notice if I decide to change up my desktop look. Here is another screenshot of my desktop with a terminator window in the middle.

Hope this gives you the basics and files to incorporate conky on your desktop. I have only used this on an i3 desktop, but I am assume that you could take these files and with the right tweaking get them to run on a different desktop/window manager. Enjoy!!!