Conky is highly configurable and is able to monitor many system variables including the status of the CPU, memory, swap space, disk storage, temperatures, processes, network interfaces, battery power, system messages, e-mail inboxes, Linux updates, many popular music players, and much more. Conky has gained a strong following among many Linux and BSD enthusiasts.
Unlike system monitors that use high-level widget toolkits to render their information, Conky is drawn directly in an X window. This allows it to consume relatively fewer system resources when configured similarly. Not only does Conky have many built-in objects, it can also display just about any piece of information by using scripts and other external programs.
Conky features built-in support for several unrelated sources of information, but its biggest strength lies in its extensibility through scripting. Conky can be extened threw python scripting many Conky versions are used in WordPress blogs for written visualization tools. Conky is supported natively on Debian, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, Gentoo, Arch, Foresight, and can be compiled from source.
The name Conky comes from a character in the Canadian TV show titled “Trailer Park Boys”. Conky has been licensed under the GPL 3.0. The download is hosted on SourceForge and the project can be joined on GitHub.