Conky is a free, open-source desktop system monitor for Linux and BSD. See its features, configuration options, and how it compares to alternatives.
Conky is a free, open-source system monitor that displays real-time desktop widgets showing detailed statistics about a computer's hardware and software state, including CPU load, memory and swap usage, disk space, network activity, temperatures, battery level, and running processes. It runs on Linux, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD and was originally built for the X Window System, with support later extended to Wayland environments.
The project began in 2005 when developer Brenden Matthews forked it from an earlier system monitor called Torsmo, aiming to create a more flexible and extensible tool. Conky has since become a staple of the Linux desktop customization community, particularly among users of tiling window managers and heavily customized desktop setups.
Conky is configured through a plain text configuration file rather than a graphical settings panel, giving experienced users precise control over layout, colors, fonts, update frequency, and exactly which metrics are shown. This text-based approach favors flexibility and low resource usage over ease of onboarding for new users.
Built-in Lua scripting support lets advanced users extend Conky well beyond its native metrics, building custom widgets, animations, or integrations with external data sources such as weather services, email inboxes, or music player status for players like MPD and Audacious.
Because Conky began as a fork of Torsmo, its licensing reflects that history: code inherited from Torsmo remains under the BSD license, while all new code written for Conky since the fork is released under the GNU General Public License version 3 (GPL 3.0). The project is maintained as an open-source repository on GitHub under brndnmtthws/conky, with ongoing community contributions rather than a single commercial owner.
Conky is used to display real-time system statistics like CPU usage, memory, disk space, network activity, and battery level as desktop widgets on Linux, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD.
Yes, Conky is free and open source, licensed under a combination of the BSD license for original Torsmo-derived code and GPL 3.0 for newer code.
Conky supports Linux, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD, and works with both the X Window System and Wayland.
Conky was created by Brenden Matthews in 2005 as a fork of an earlier system monitor called Torsmo.
Yes, Conky includes built-in Lua scripting support, letting advanced users build custom widgets and data sources beyond its native monitoring features.
Conky is configured through a plain text configuration file that controls layout, fonts, colors, update intervals, and which metrics are displayed.
No, Conky is designed to be lightweight because it draws directly in an X window rather than relying on a heavier graphical toolkit, which keeps resource consumption relatively low.
No, Conky is built for Unix-like systems, specifically Linux, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD, and is not natively available for Windows or macOS.