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rayzr522 / now-clocking

a conky widget that shows now playing information when music is playing or a clock when music is not playing
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clock cmus conky conky-widget monstercat mpris now-playing playerctl spotify

readme

Now Clocking

made with :heart: by @gamehelp16 and @rayzr522

Now Clocking is a Conky widget which shows a Monstercat style Now Playing when music is played via a playerctl-compatible player or cmus, or a clock when no music is playing

screenshot of clock screenshot of spotify

Table of contents

requirements

packages

Ubuntu: sudo apt install conky ffmpeg playerctl

Arch: sudo pacman -S conky ffmpeg playerctl

fonts

on most Linux distros, you can just run the ./download-fonts.sh script to download the fonts

supported players

these widgets support cmus as well as (in theory) any MPRIS/playerctl compatible players

the following is a non-exhaustive list of examples of supported players:

installation

  1. install all required packages and fonts
  2. clone the repo:
git clone git@github.com:rayzr522/now-clocking.git
  1. ensure that all required fonts are installed:
# install by hand or you can try the automated installation script:
./download-fonts.sh
  1. run the start.sh script to start the widget (forks to background):
path/to/now-clocking/start.sh

config

there's a few things you can configure about these widgets via environment variables. the widgets will automatically attempt to load a config.env in this directory. feel free to copy config-example.env for this purpose

the settings you can configure are as follows:

setting example description
NOW_CLOCKING_ARTWORK_TINT green or #aabbcc applies a color filter to the album artwork. can be useful for matching it to your wallpaper/theme. requires imagemagick to be installed
NOW_CLOCKING_DISPLAY 1 changes the display that the widget renders on via the xinerama_head conky option. 0 is probably your default display
NOW_CLOCKING_OFFSET_X 69 shifts the widget on the X axis by the given amount. default positioning is designed to look pretty well balanced, but if you need to adjust it this gives you an easy way to do so
NOW_CLOCKING_OFFSET_Y 420 same as above, but on the Y axis
NOW_CLOCKING_TEXT_COLOR #ffffff changes the color of the text. useful if you're using a lighter wallpaper

FAQ

why are there 2 Conky widgets?

originally, this had to do with weird transparency issues in conky that required a non-transparent album artwork. however, that has long since been patched in conky. the widgets have remained separated, however, so as to make aligning everything easier, especially since one widget functions both as the track info and a clock

how do I configure which monitor to display the widget on?

set NOW_CLOCKING_DISPLAY in your config.env. see config for more info

the widget is slow to update when using with

if you're using a playerctl-compatible player inside a flatpak, you may need to use Flatseal to enable D-Bus access for your app

i personally had to do this with Muzika & Vivaldi to get things working smoothly on my own system

credits

huge props to the original creator, @gamehelp16. I used this script back in 2017/2018 and rediscovered it in 2020, and decided to rework it to be more portable, efficient, and updated to modern conky config standards

also huge props to Hoefler & Frere-Jones for the wonderful Gotham fonts, and Julieta Ulanovsky (and crew) for the slick Montserrat font