OSD Monitors

Introduction

OSD Monitors is the ideal tool for those of us, who prefer simple window managers and don't want precious screen space cluttered with panels, icons and other rubbish (my WM of choice is pekwm). It uses the xosd library to transparently display various textual monitors on a fixed position of the screen. If there should be multiple monitors running at the same time, user is expected to run multiple instances of osd_monitors with different parameters. It is written in pure C, runs under Linux (X Windows), and has very few dependencies and very low CPU and memory footprint.

Features

• Uses libxosd2 for achieving pseudo-transparency. Floats on top of all windows (is shaped and unmanaged), everything but the letters is transparent.

• User definable string format, font, position, outline, drop shadow.

• Intelligent unit display (automatically switches to kB/MB/…. units depending on value).

• User definable colors for different values (CPU utilization can show green/yellow/red depending on value).

• Can hide/show/toggle visibility upon signal receive. Define keyboard shortcuts in your favourite WM and toggle visibility when the monitors obscure some part of the screen you need to see.

• Compact, easy to modify GPLed C source code you can alter to suit your needs.

As of version 0.1, following monitors are implemented:

• clock

• cpu activity

• context switches per second

• processes in the Running state

• used memory

• used swap

• swapping activity

• used disk space

• disk activity

• network activity

If you happen to write some more monitors or find some bugs, send me patches or reports.

Screenshots

OSD Monitors in action at the bottom right part of the screen

Download

You can download the program source here.