Living without panels..

For literally most of my Linux life I’ve been using xfce as my main desktop environment. Using xfce I’ve always had some form of xfce4-panel around the edge of the screen & conky sitting either on the desktop or inside the panel “see this gist for a how-to”.

Recently I wanted to see what it would be like living without any panels or visible conky. The problem was that I still needed (wanted:?) a system tray for the likes of steam & clipman. Anyway.. I removed everything from my panel apart from the system tray & then set it to always be hidden unless I hovered over it. Next was conky. I wanted conky to output to the terminal & appear whenever I pressed a keyboard shortcut. This didn’t take very long & was super easy to make.

[ JUST A SIDE NOTE ] Conky set to output to the terminal can get messy very quickly, because it simply output’s over & over.

To get things working & displaying the way I wanted I had to set conky to run only once within the config, but use the watch command in the script to have it run more than just once.

watch -t -n 1 'conky -q -c /home/furycd001/Dots/conky/terminal.conf'

With that done I decided I wanted the open window to be positioned to the top right of my external monitor. This was easily done using xdotools.

xdotool getwindowfocus windowmove 2948 22

Finally I saved the script script & executed it using the following command linked to a keyboard shortcut.

xfce4-terminal -H --hide-menubar --geometry=38x7 --execute /home/furycd001/Dots/Gucci/conkyterminal.sh &

Here’s the conky config & complete script incase your interested.

I been using this setup almost a month ago now & I haven’t had any problems. I’ve also been using xfce with no window decorations for a number of years now & my system looks more minimal than ever. I don’t miss my panel & I really don’t miss window decorations. I can see this being my setup for quite some time now & I’ll probably find it hard if I ever try going back to using a panel.