My goal was to
display a “Message of the Day”, randomly-selected at boot, in the
Conky text area. A message would be a block of text having varied
length lines and an undefined width, as shown below. Importantly, I wanted the
selected message’s block of text to be centered rather than
left-justified.
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| Text block with varied length lines in a text file |
The ability to
dynamically center a block of text in Conky is something I had
assumed would be straightforward. I carefully read through the Conky
man page and did a lot of online searching for info on the subject.
It's likely I overlooked something, used the wrong search terms, or
searched the wrong places, but in the end I couldn’t really find
anything about how to do it. So, if I wanted it, I'd have to do it myself.
The result was a Lua script called from in the .conkyrc file that reads lines of
text from a text file, then adds a Conky center alignment object
(i.e. ${alignc}) to the beginning of each line while also equalizing
the length of each line. That way, while each line of the
script-processed text is independently centered, the result is an
effective centering of the block of text rather than centering of
each of the varied length lines of the unprocessed text.
Here’s an example…
 |
| Text block displayed in Conky at various widths |
The script is available free of charge at https://github.com/dfyockey/conky-text-block-centering. Enjoy!
