Nethack 4 Conky Desktop

     I love Linux. Specifically minimalist installations that allow for maximium configuration and fiddling.

     I usually prefer archlinux, but lately they've been releasing bleeding edge kernels and patches, which have resulted in lots of breakage and bad dependencies. I go so frustrated with it that I left and started looking for alternative distros.

     I wasn't having much luck. So many distros are geared towards a heavy GUI foundation, and target a new user base. Until I found Crunchbang#! Linux, that is. It is a stripped version of ubuntu, which uses openbox as the default window manager, and only includes the bare necessities. That way I get all the stability and hardware support of ubuntu, without all of the cruft.

     I spent all of last weekend fiddling with it and installing it. I finally got it working almost perfectly, and turned my attention towards the fun stuff: Personalization!


     My first step was to pick a conky config. Conky is a very light desktop-sensors-rainmeter type of program. The beauty is how light on resources it is, as well as its flexibility. Everything is configured through config files, although a GUI tool is becoming more popular.

     I was thinking about what kind of config I should do, and when I need to think, I play video games. I recently got Nethack4 compiled, and thought I would give it a shot! Nethack is an old-school terminal-graphics dungeon crawler.

You're the little @ symbol. It's more fun than it looks :)

     As I played, I realized that the solution to my problem was simple. Nethack already has a complete text interface, and conky primarily deals in text! Why not combine the two?

     I spent about 4 hours tweaking the settings and getting them just right, but I'm very happy with the result.

The map is static, but the rest updates every second.

     You can see my calender in the top left, with the weather in the top right. Various CPU processes are in the inventory, and my "health" in the bottom left is actually my network data.

     I had a lot of fun messing around with this conky! Maybe you'll find some of the scripts inspirational for your own configs.

     here are the scripts below:

conkyNethack4

     Message me with any questions or comments!

                                               -David