MX Conky Help

Background

MX Conky is a tool whose goal is to render the use and customization of conky scripts available to a wider and non-technical audience. It consists of a gui program and an associated data file of conkies that have been tested and edited for use in MX Linux.

Conky is an extremely versatile system monitoring utility that can display on your desktop a wide variety of information. Many creative conky scripts exist that have expanded its original scope to include music, email, weather, updates, etc. Its range has been further extended with the use of Lua, a lightweight and powerful programming language.

Many users find conky configurations (“conkies”) difficult to customize. They come from many different sources, they often follow no consistent configuration layout, many older ones no longer work for one reason or another, and the text itself is difficult to understand.

MX Conky was created to provide an easy starting point for users lacking prior experience. The 2025 upgrade completely reworks it into a full-featured conky manager. Some users, especially those with prior versions, may wish to add Conky Manager (conky-manager2) as an auxillary tool.

Use

NB: do not put a conky config into your /home folder (~/.conkyrc) as traditionally recommended, but into the hidden folder ~/.conky/ instead.

MX Conky Main Interface

The main window of MX Conky has the following elements:

  1. The filter window allows you to restrict conkies shown to a certain location or condition.
  2. Each conky found following the filter setting is displayed in a separate entry.
  3. An autologin checkbox allows you to set a conky to appear on the desktop on login. More than one conky can be set.
  4. A group of control buttons for the individual conky make changes easier.
    1. Delete. The conky will be permanently removed from its location.
    2. Edit. Opens the conky script in a text editor. If the conky is one of those installed by default into /usr/share/mx-conky-data/themes/ then you will be prompted to copy it into your Home directory before editing.
    3. Customize. Launches a separate window for advanced editing.
    4. Start/Stop. Sets the running state for the current session.
  5. A group of system buttons:
    1. Refresh. Search and display all conkies matching the Settings filter.
    2. Start all. Display all conkies enabled to start.
    3. Stop all. Hide all running conkies.
    4. Previews. Create a preview for a selected conky.
    5. Settings. Determine the conky locations to be included.
  6. The preview window. If no preview is shown use the system button to create one.

Customize window

The 6 tabs are self-explanatory, with the exception of Colors. In the image above, you can see the colors that were used in the selected conky. You will find those colors listed in the conky script itself, but it is greatly easier to change them with MX Conky.

To understand how to proceed, let’s use MX Conky to alter the color of a default conky, taking MX-Cowan_less as our example. Here is the original:

Cowan Purple Original

Launch MX Conky, navigate to that conky and open it, and click on Run so you can see it while you work. Here is the Color field you will see in the Colors tab of the Customize window:

Conky Color Configuration

Now let's change the purple to, say, dark orange. Click the little change box with three dots to the right of the purple "Color2" and use one of three ways to change it:

The result will be an instant change to the conky something like this:

Cowan Orange Result

Notice that it took less than one minute to make the change!

Tips and Tricks

Technical Details

Resources

Development history: Jerry3904 and Adrian