Eww, yuck! Well not really, it's more like WOW.
Eww is the name of the widget system, built using Rust, so it must be fast! This widget system makes it pretty easy to implement your own widget system.
Check out the docs here https://github.com/elkowar/eww , a recent addition of the tool is that configuration can be achieved using the configuration language: Yuck. I personally am not a fan of the previous method of using XML files for the widget structure.
As shown by the above image, and within the documentation, quite a shiny example has been created by the developer Axarva, to which I based my inspiration from, and begun to reverse engineer it to further understand the eww system.
My original gripe with Axarva's example, was that it is a bit too flashy and not very practical. So I started to resize everything, and rearrange structurally to how my previous Conky https://github.com/brndnmtthws/conky setup looked like.
As you can see, I was using conky, trying to be as flashy as possible, however I thought a lot were just distractions vs anything I particularly cared about. I really struggled to get a good looking spotify widget working, and because it was an overload of information it just made it a bit hard to read.
I also kept coming across issuse with conky freezing, however this could have just been a poor setup.
What did I want from EWW.
- My mandlebrot picture for art inspiration
- My system home name, for egoism.
- Todo list, replaces post it notes, by always being available and sorted by priority, it's a script I made.
- Quote for inspiration (Start filling it with quotes that matter to me for regular inspiration)
- Current Date and Time, my previous conky made this pretty hard to read. But I am pretty bad with time keeping so make it bigger and flashier.
- Spotify, EWW allows me to really design my own widget, maybe I can start to know songs by name, because I never look at song names usually, and now I can even appreciate album art.
- Interactive Volume, oh boy, this took me quite a few hours to write my own scripts for in conky, and even then was pretty sketchy.
- Ram and CPU performance, I have a beefy 64GB ram and a beefy CPU, so this should not matter, but I should evaluate my life if these ever go above 50%
- Glava - same thing for audiovisualisation
- Accessible power settings, so I do not have to manually type anything out. I use this mainly for suspend / lock.
My Setup
Whilst there are a few tweaks to do, I am extremely happy with this setup, and it is extremely fun to configure, I definitely recommend if you are interested in the latest widgets for your system.