Conky bar

Summary
Conky is a light-weight system monitor which can be completely customized to your needs. In Awesome2, it was possible to pipe its output to awesome-client. As far as I know this doesn't work in Awesome3, so I came up with another way of having a Conky bar at the bottom of my screen.

This technique creates a wibox at the bottom of the screen that is empty; this prevents Awesome from placing windows there. Conky is then configured to draw its system info on the root window in the empty space reserved by the wibox.

Awesome configuration
mystatusbar = awful.wibox({ position = "bottom", screen = 1, ontop = false, width = 1, height = 16 })


 * position = "bottom" puts the wibox at the bottom of the screen
 * screen = 1 places the wibox on screen 1
 * ontop = false means it doesn't have to be on top of other windows (it'll be empty anyway)
 * width = 1: one pixel wide is enough
 * height = 16: in my case, this is exactly the height of my Conky, so windows will touch it without overlapping

Conky configuration
This is configured in ~/.conkyrc In the TEXT block, notice the \ at the end of every line - this is equivalent to putting the whole thing on one line, only it's easier to read and maintain. There should be no blank lines after the last configuration line, because Conky will draw them.

Of course, if you want {n} lines, you can. Just make sure to adjust the height of your wibox accordingly.

alignment bottom_middle background yes border_width 1 cpu_avg_samples 2 default_color 222222 default_outline_color 222222 draw_borders no draw_graph_borders yes draw_outline no draw_shades no use_xft yes xftfont Sans Mono:size=8 gap_x 5 gap_y 0 minimum_size 1260 6 maximum_width 1260 net_avg_samples 2 no_buffers yes out_to_console no out_to_stderr no extra_newline no own_window no own_window_class Conky own_window_type desktop own_window_transparent yes stippled_borders 0 update_interval 1.0 uppercase no use_spacer left show_graph_scale no show_graph_range no format_human_readable yes

color1 666666 color2 888888 color3 444444

mpd_host 127.0.0.1

TEXT ${if_mpd_playing} [${mpd_status} - ${mpd_elapsed}/${mpd_length}] ${scroll 35 5 ${mpd_smart}} ${else} \ ${color1}Activity on /dev/sda:${color} ${diskiograph 10,50 000000 ff0000 -t}${endif} \ ${alignr}${color1}br0 [${color3}${addr br0}${color}]: ${color1}Up:${color} ${upspeed br0} ${color1} - Down:${color} ${downspeed br0}    \ ${alignr}${color1}Battery: [${color3}${acpiacadapter}${color1}] ${color}${battery_percent BAT1}% ${battery_bar 5,50 BAT1} | \ ${color1}CPU: ${color} ${cpu}% ${cpubar cpu0 5,50} ${color2}CPU1: ${cpubar cpu1 5,50} CPU2: ${cpubar cpu2 5,50} ${color}| \ ${color1}RAM:${color} ${memperc}% ${membar 5,50}