I had some free time this weekend and so I quickly coded a small app for managing Conky scripts. It displays a list of Conky themes installed on your system and allows the user to start and stop specific themes. It also has an option to start Conky on system startup.
Installation
If you are using Ubuntu 12.04, 12.10, 13.04 (or any of its derivates like Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Linux Mint) then you can install it from the LaunchPad PPA:
Open a terminal window (CTRL+ALT+T) on your machine and type the following commands one by one:
sudo apt-add-repository -y ppa:teejee2008/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install conky-manager
For other Debian systems the DEB package can be download from LaunchPad.net
How it works
Themes are kept in the ~/conky-manager directory. Each sub-folder in this location will be displayed as a separate theme. The folder name becomes the theme title. Selecting a theme from the top list will display the conkyrc files in the bottom list. Click the checkboxes in the top list or the bottom list to start or stop a theme.
The Options tab has an option to start Conky on system startup. It creates an autostart entry in ~./.config/autostart when checked, and removes the file when un-checked. The actual startup script is written to ~/conky-manager/conky-startup.sh. This script will be updated when the app exits.
How to package a theme
A few themes have been packaged with the app. In order to add themes a few rules must be followed.
Each sub-folder in the location ~/conky-manager will be displayed as a separate theme. The folder name will be displayed as the theme name and the folder will be set as the working-directory for Conky.
All .conkyrc files must be kept in a sub-folder named config. All files in this location will be treated as .conkyrc files. The .conkyrc file extension is not mandatory. The config files can also be kept directly in the base folder if the files have a .conkyrc extension.
The .conkyrc files should not have any hard-coded paths. All paths must be relative to the base folder.
Fonts must be kept in a sub-folder named fonts. Fonts from this location will be automatically installed to ~/.fonts when the user starts the theme.
The preview image (optional) must be named preview.png and kept in the base folder.
The credits and other information for the theme can be specified in the file info.txt placed in the base folder.
Reporting Bugs
The project is hosted on Launchpad: https://launchpad.net/conky-manager
Bugs can be reported on the Launchpad bug tracker.
More features are planned and more themes will be added soon. Suggestions are welcome.