If you're comfortable with those tasks, try a simple shell command - uptime or ls -l, just to see how it works. Start with a live update image or the display of a file's contents, as those are probably the easiest two tasks to create. Probably the best thing to do is to download it and start playing with it. Going into a ton of detail on everything you could do with GeekTool will take more time than I have available. Once a task has been created, you can move and size its window by either entering the data in the Location portion of the input screen, or by dragging and stretching its window with the mouse - just make sure you select the task in the Groups window first. A better solution would be a numeric entry box and a pop-up menu for choosing between seconds, minutes, hours, etc. The only time interval allowed is seconds, which makes for lots of math when you want to update something twice a day, once a week, once a month, etc. You can even specify any window as an "always on top" window, in which case it will float over all other OS X objects (including the dock).Įntering the update intervals is more difficult than it need be. Each of the types of GeekTool tasks has its own settings, along with universal options for update interval, window size, position, color, and (if applicable) text. You create new entries in groups, and then assign a task (display a file, output from a shell command, or show an image) to that entry. GeekTool's interface is a bit confusing and can be somewhat daunting to understand, but it gets easier the more you use it. And no, I don't normally devote this much screen space to GeekTool toys my usual set is just the uptime display, cal output, and (on interesting weather days) the weather map. The top left image is the Portland Doppler radar, which gets refreshed every 10 minutes, and to the right of that is an infrared image of the sun, updated every four hours. To the right of the calendar is a three-month Apple stock chart, updated every five minutes. The calendar output is only updated once per day. In the left corner is a calendar, courtesy of the cal command (as discussed in the linked hint above). At the very bottom of the screen, the output of the uptime command is displayed, and it updates automatically every 15 minutes. Everything else is pretty much optional, you can select fonts, colours, position, etc.I've got five separate GeekTool tasks running in the above image. The refresh field is how often you want the script to rerun, I chose 3,600 seconds, but you can go with either shorter or longer intervals. Once this is all working, you just need to drag a new “Shell” widget from GeekTool onto your desktop, and set the Command field to the script location, “/Users/username/Scripts/IPAddresses.sh -c /Users/username/Scripts/” The -c switch just specifies the location of the configuration file you created, the GeekTool scheduler won’t be able to find it otherwise, even if it’s in the same directory. You should see an output similar to the screenshot above. Once this is done, you can test this in the Terminal app again by running “./IPAddresses.sh” from the directory you stored the script in. You can run “ifconfig -a” from the Terminal app if you’re unsure. …which should be your ethernet and WiFi ports. All it contains is a list of the network interfaces to probe, typically just… To get it running, you’ll need to create an IPAddresses.cfg in the same directory you’ve put the script in (I just use Scripts under my home directory). You can download my network interface script here. Here I have some weather, and whatever network interface my MacBook using along with my current IP address. It lets you display various kinds of information on your desktop via 3 default plug-ins.” With a little bit of scripting ability, you can display all sorts of useful information on your desktop. GeekTool, in their words “is an application for Mac OS 10.6+.
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