macOS Port conky to os x

[natere2ster]

anyone have any pointers for getting conky, an Light-weight system monitor for X, onto os x? I can't seem to get the thing to ./configure, make, make check, make install. It has a file called "configure.ac" but when I run the command
> autoconf configure.ac I get a a LOT of stuff running down the screen ending with the following errors:

srcdir/BUGS
echo
configure.ac:28: error: possibly undefined macro: AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE
If this token and others are legitimate, please use m4_pattern_allow.
See the Autoconf documentation.
configure.ac:121: error: possibly undefined macro: AC_PROG_GNU_M4
configure.ac:127: error: possibly undefined macro: AM_MISSING_PROG
configure.ac:189: error: possibly undefined macro: AM_PATH_LISPDIR
configure.ac:203: error: possibly undefined macro: AC_PROG_MAKE_CASE_SENSITIVE

How can I go about removing these errors?

 

[mfram]

What's your ultimate goal here? Any program which reports system status information like this is system-specific.

The Conky website lists Linux and BSD support which I assume to mean OpenBSD/FreeBSD. Mac is not mentioned. I just browsed the source code and I don't see any sign of support for collecting information about Mac systems. So even if you could get the more Unix-generic functionality to work, there is no code in there to collect system status information on a Mac. The Linux and BSD backends aren't going to work.

So in my estimation it would take a significant amount of time to port this tool to MacOS. You would first need to understand the software design and then you would have to modify the source code to add support to collecting information using Mac system calls. It's not impossible, but it's not a matter of tweaking Makefiles or Autogen scripts. You need to do software development.

Maybe you're just looking to run the front-end on a Mac and not collect system status information about the Mac. That might be more feasible. But you'd still have to modify the source code. I'm just assuming Conky has some kind of client/server functionality in it. But I don't know because I haven't used it.

BTW, there's documentation describing how to compile Conky and the steps you took don't seem to be those steps. Not that it's going to matter.

You know about the Activity Monitor app that Apple includes with Mac OS, right?

 

[bingefeller]

I asked the exact same question on the Macports mailing list a while back and was basically told the same as mfram told you. It doesn't work on Mac and would take a lot of time and hard work to get it to work apparently (I don't know anything about programming but saw this thread and thought that I'd chime in).

 

[aarond12]

I might even go one further and say that you should check out iStat Menus. It's NOT a free application, but it does everything Conky does and more. And it's Mac-specific.

 

[robvas]

I might even go one further and say that you should check out iStat Menus. It's NOT a free application, but it does everything Conky does and more. And it's Mac-specific.

MenuMeters is a free one, but it does a little bit less. Activity Monitor has quite a few features, too.

 

[npyl]

I have started a port of conky for macOS! You can check it out on GitHub: project

It isn't complete but with the help of others probably it will be one day!