Conky Harmattan is a really beautiful and informative Conky config for the Linux desktop — and it just gotten a teeny bit easier to use.
The Harmattan Conky theme is popular because it’s so diverse. It has multiple themes each with multiple formats and each format with two mode. Whether you want a mini weather box, a compact forecast, or a tall upright column with all-the-info, Harmattan has it.
As testament to how good things last: our article on Conky Harmattan from 2014 is still largely applicable. The only major deviation is that the config has a couple additional themes (including one based on this very website!) and a different weather API provider, OpenWeatherMap.
The most difficult part about using this wonderful Conky theme is picking and setting a theme. To try a theme you have to copy/paste the relevant theme file into your home folder and manually rename it .conkyrc. No great hassle, but when there are so many themes available, and you want to see which one suits your desktop best, it can be a real chore.
Not so any more.
A recent update to the Harmattan Conky introduces an interactive CLI manager (of sorts) that lets you cycle through each theme, format and mode by pressing keyboard keys. When you find the one you like you can save it. The interactive management tool also provides a less intimidating way to add the API keys required for weather, saving you from needing to deep device into the config file in a text editor.
A few things I will note: I couldn’t get this (or any) cocky theme to appear under GNOME Shell without a heavy shadow border. In theory changing the window_type= to ‘override‘ fixes this, but that spat errors on my system.
Being on a wired ethernet connection and not Wi-Fi, I needed to change the ‘eth1’ settings to ‘ens33’ (related to a change in how Ubuntu assigns network addresses) to get the upload and download activity section to show up.
You’ll find all the salient details on how you can install Conky Harmattan and use it on your desktop over on the Harmattan Github page linked to below.