README.md

@@ -4,16 +4,34 @@ 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
+I pipe the output of conky through dmenu, which upates every two seconds.  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.  
+TODO:  My formatting function needs to be generalized.  Essentially, I'm
+creating a conky-specific printf function. Right now, it's split into two
+functions, with calls to the Lua string.format function.  One function takes
+only one format specifier, and the other takes two.  
 
-TODO:  Add color to the conky output!  That will take if statments, and text
-for dmenu to consume.
+The `fmt()` function takes the format string, and expects a single numerical
+second argument.  If the format string contains any format specifiers (see `man
+sprintf` for details) that aren't numbers (e.g. `%s` for strings), fmt() will
+fail with an error.  I use this for the percentages of RAM, Swap, and CPU in
+use.
+
+The `fmt2()` function takes the format string, and expects two string arguments.
+It is not necessarily an error if either or both of the arguments are numbers,
+they will be cast to strings.  I use this function to format the bandwidth
+("Net:") display in conky, so the length of this segment doesn't shift around
+(the Unicode arrow icons for up and down bandwidth stay in the same place).  
+
+Ideally these two functions would be combined into a `"conky_printf` function,
+that could take an arbitrary format string with any number of format
+specifiers, with the requisite number of numerical or string arguments.  I know
+how to do this with the `...`/`arg`/`unpack(arg)` table specification in Lua,
+but numeric specifiers need to convert any strings passed to the function to
+numeric values instead of strings.  This is the challenging part, but should be
+doable.

conky.conf

@@ -39,15 +39,11 @@ conky.config = {
 
 conky.text = 
 [[\
-${lua_parse printf %-20s ${nodename_short}} \
 RAM:${lua_parse printf %3.0f%% ${memperc}} \
 Swap:${lua_parse printf %3.0f%% ${swapperc}} \
 CPU:${lua_parse printf %3.0f%% ${cpu cpu0}} \
-/ ${lua_parse printf %10s/%10s ${fs_used /} ${fs_size /}} \
+/ ${fs_used /}/${fs_size /} \
 ${loadavg} \
-${lua_parse printf %-20s ${top name 1}} \
-${lua_parse printf %8d ${top pid 1}} \
-${lua_parse printf %3.2f ${top cpu 1}} \
-${lua_parse printf %3.2f ${top mem 1}} \
+${top name 1} ${top pid 1} ${top cpu 1} ${top mem 1} \
 Net: ${lua_parse printf %10s▲%10s▼ ${upspeed wlp4s0} ${downspeed wlp4s0}} \
 ]];