This is Trey Blancher's conky configuration. I have no need for fancy graphics, meter bars, or anything else X-related. I run XMonad, so I hardly ever see the root window (mostly I only see one window taking up the entire screen, with a dmenu at the top, and another dmenu at the bottom that runs conky). I run conky in CLI mode only, and that's good enough for me.

I pipe the output of conky through dmenu, which upates every second. I also have custom formatting functions (see scripts.lua in this repository). This ensures the output of conky has the same length, even if certain fields within the string change. This is especially useful for the network bandwidth output, which otherwise change length every two seconds as the bandwidth usage fluctuates between bytes (B), Kilobytes (KiB), and Megabytes (MiB).

I have implemented conky_printf, a generalized function for printing conky data to the output string. It needs more testing, as I'm sure there are edge cases where it doesn't work properly.