A compact Conky system-monitor HUD for a secondary Full-HD display. This is vibe-coded by me with ChatGPT to make my second screen more useful when I leave it blank.

I am on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS with an NVIDIA graphics card.

You can find it in

Demos/

Designed around:

• Jersey 15 pixel font
• CPU load graph / temperature / package power / current clock
• NVIDIA GPU utilization / temperature / power / VRAM
• RAM usage
• NVMe usage / temperature / I/O
• Weather, location, time, and uptime
• Audio spectrum analyser (CAVA + Lua/Cairo) with the current track
• Xinerama multi-monitor placement

The default layout is intended for a 1920×1080 secondary display and uses roughly one quarter of the screen width.

Ubuntu/Debian:

sudo apt install conky-all lm-sensors curl fontconfig cava playerctl

conky-all is required, not conky-std: the spectrum analyser is drawn from Lua with the Cairo bindings, which only the -all build ships.

For NVIDIA telemetry, the NVIDIA driver must provide nvidia-smi.

For NVMe tools if you want to inspect drives manually:

sudo apt install nvme-cli

Clone the repository and run:

chmod +x install.sh
./install.sh

Then start both Conky windows:

~/.config/conky/scripts/start-conky.sh

The HUD and the spectrum are two separate Conky instances, so start-conky.sh launches both and detaches them. The autostart entry calls the same script.

The bars under AUDIO SPECTRUM are not a Conky widget, they are drawn by spectrum/spectrum.lua through lua_draw_hook_post. The chain is:

CAVA  ->  /tmp/conky-cava.fifo  ->  spectrum_bridge.py
      ->  /tmp/conky-spectrum.dat  ->  spectrum.lua  ->  Conky window

The spectrum has its own Conky instance, conky-spectrum.conf, running at 60 fps and anchored to the bottom of the screen, while conky.conf holds the telemetry at 1 s. They are separate because update_interval is global: at 60 fps the 480 px CPU graph would only hold 8 seconds of history, and Conky averages LOAD, READ and WRITE over that same interval.

Conky only draws what it finds in /tmp/conky-spectrum.dat, so CAVA and the bridge must be running as well. install.sh ships a user service for that:

systemctl --user enable --now conky-spectrum.service

It restarts the pair if either half dies, and start-spectrum.sh exits as soon as one of them does so the chain is never left half alive. Logs:

systemctl --user status conky-spectrum.service
journalctl --user -u conky-spectrum.service -f

To run it by hand instead, without the service:

~/.config/conky/spectrum/start-spectrum.sh

Checks when the bars stay flat:

# is the data file being refreshed?
watch -n0.2 cat /tmp/conky-spectrum.dat

# render test with a static frame: a rising staircase should appear
for i in $(seq 1 32); do printf '%d ' $((i * 3)); done > /tmp/conky-spectrum.dat

# is Conky loading the Lua script? (run that instance in a terminal)
conky -c ~/.config/conky/conky-spectrum.conf

CAVA reads the default PulseAudio/PipeWire monitor source, so the bars only move while something is actually playing.

The line between the AUDIO SPECTRUM rule and the bars comes from spectrum/now_playing.sh, which asks playerctl for the current MPRIS track — the same source the GNOME media tile reads, so browsers, Spotify, VLC and mpv all work. Player preference order is at the top of the script.

Three constraints shape it, all from the bottom-anchored layout:

• It must print exactly one line. A wrapped title would push the whole block up, so the script truncates to MAX_LENGTH characters.
• It must never print nothing. An empty line collapses and shifts the block, so an em dash is printed when no player is running.
• It forces LC_ALL=C.UTF-8. Conky inherits the session locale, and under a non-UTF-8 one bash slices bytes instead of characters, cutting multi-byte titles in half.

${scroll} is deliberately not used for long titles: it advances one step per Conky update, which at 60 fps is unreadable.

The line is set in DejaVu Sans rather than Jersey 15, which is a pixel font with no accented or non-Latin glyphs. Change it in conky-spectrum.conf if you only ever play ASCII-titled tracks.

The two windows do not know about each other: the HUD is anchored top_left and the spectrum bottom_left, and they meet in the middle. If the spectrum block overlaps the NVME section, or leaves a visible gap under it, adjust gap_y in conky-spectrum.conf — that is the only knob.

The Lua hook anchors the bars on window_height - BOTTOM_OFFSET, which measures whatever is printed under the graph band in conky-spectrum.conf — currently the 30 HZ / 20 KHZ line and the rule below it. Adding or removing a line there means changing that constant by the same number of pixels.

Two values must move together, otherwise the bars overflow the band or float above the baseline:

Raise both by the same amount. The window is anchored at the bottom of the screen, so it grows upward — check that it does not collide with the HUD above.

Bar width follows from the window: (width - 31 * BAR_GAP) / 32. To widen the whole analyser, change minimum_width and maximum_width in conky-spectrum.conf — the bars and the rules follow automatically.

Each instance has its own update_interval: 1 s for the telemetry, 0.0167 (60 fps) for the spectrum. CAVA's framerate must match the spectrum instance, otherwise Conky draws the same frame twice.

ATTACK and RELEASE in spectrum.lua are per-frame factors, so they must be retuned if that rate changes. Equivalent rise and decay times:

install.sh downloads Jersey 15 from the Google Fonts repository and installs it for the current user under:

~/.local/share/fonts/Jersey15/

cpu_power.sh reads:

/sys/class/powercap/intel-rapl:0/energy_uj

Some distributions make this root-only. If PKG POWER shows N/A, test:

cat /sys/class/powercap/intel-rapl:0/energy_uj

If you get Permission denied, you can install the optional service:

sudo ./system/install-rapl-permissions.sh

This makes the RAPL energy counters world-readable on boot. Review the script before using it if this is a multi-user machine.

The default Conky config contains:

xinerama_head = 1,
alignment = 'top_left',
gap_x = 20,
gap_y = 18,

Check your monitor indices with:

xrandr --listmonitors

Change xinerama_head if your secondary display uses a different index.

The current machine uses:

nvme-pci-0300

for the Linux system NVMe sensor.

If your mapping changes, run:

sensors

and either edit scripts/ssd_temp.sh, or launch Conky with:

CONKY_NVME_SENSOR=nvme-pci-XXXX conky -c ~/.config/conky/conky.conf

The installer places a desktop entry in:

~/.config/autostart/conky-telemetry.desktop

It waits 5 seconds after login so the desktop and monitor layout can initialize before Conky starts.

.
├── conky.conf
├── conky-spectrum.conf
├── Demos
│   └── Screenshot.png -- The preview
│   └── Setup -- My setup, direct to me is the Dell 2K monitor and the FullHD secondary monitor is aligned on the bottom line of the primary
├── install.sh
├── uninstall.sh
├── autostart/
│   └── conky-telemetry.desktop.in
├── scripts/
│   ├── cpu_clock.sh
│   ├── cpu_clock_pct.sh
│   ├── cpu_max_ghz.sh
│   ├── cpu_name.sh
│   ├── cpu_power.sh
│   ├── gpu_name.sh
│   ├── gpu_util.sh
│   ├── ssd_name.sh
│   ├── ssd_temp.sh
│   └── start-conky.sh
├── spectrum/
│   ├── cava.conf
│   ├── spectrum_bridge.py
│   ├── spectrum.lua
│   └── start-spectrum.sh
└── system/
    ├── conky-spectrum.service
    └── install-rapl-permissions.sh

The CPU clock shown is the highest current logical-CPU frequency. This is more intuitive on hybrid Intel CPUs than displaying one arbitrary core.

The graph under it plots total CPU load from scripts/cpu_load_pct.sh, which diffs /proc/stat between calls and returns 0–100 — the same busy ratio as ${cpu}, everything except idle and iowait. At update_interval = 1 each pixel is one second, so the 480 px graph holds 8 minutes.

Conky's built-in ${cpugraph} would be the obvious choice here, but on this machine (conky 1.19, Ubuntu 24.04) it draws an empty frame: the border renders, the data never arrives. ${execigraph} with the script above works, so that is what the config uses.

scripts/cpu_clock_average_pct.sh is no longer used by conky.conf. It is kept for anyone who prefers an average-clock graph: swap the ${cpugraph} line for

${execigraph 1 ~/.config/conky/scripts/cpu_clock_average_pct.sh 52,480 FFFFFF FFFFFF 100}

Be aware that on recent Intel parts scaling_cur_freq reports the requested P-state rather than the measured frequency, which pins that graph near 100 % even at idle.

MIT