Recent MacOS updates have made some of the scripts and commands invalid. What Comes After GeekTool?Ĭommunity, some people are of the opinion the application is on a downhill slide. Once you close out of GeekTool, you can click on any icon on the screen like normal. One of GeekTool’s strengths is that you can place folders and files on the desktop without any interference with the functionality, even if the folder is directly on top of one of the shells. Those background images are just photos the users found and set as their desktop image, and then they overlaid the GeekTool settings on their screen. Just take a look at some of these desktops from users on theĬircular graphs to show CPU and RAM usage, has a reminder at the bottom of the Of coding to help you navigate the various commands, there is almost nothing GeekTool is a powerful tool, and if you learn a base amount GeekTool and found it to your liking, the next step is to implement moreĬomplex commands. This is for the truly tech-savvy out there that want to monitor their system’s core temperature, CPU usage, and more. Log lets you keep an eye on what’s happening inside your computer. That rely on input from the web, such as the weather or stock information. While you can, in theory, have an entire web page show up on yourĭesktop, it doesn’t exactly work right. Web lets you link to a website or include an HTML script on yourĭesktop. It cycles through images at a specific interval. You can change the refresh rate to whatever length you want so It also has an easy, one-click option to display a random image from Image places an empty shell which you can fill with an image of yourĬhoice. The three other options are very similar. It will open a Microsoft Word-like toolbar for changing the font, the size, the color, and much more. If you want to display the way text looks, just click the button that says Click here to set font % color. A more comprehensive list can be found at the official repository of Geeklets or on the GeekTool subreddit. These are just a few basic examples of the kinds of commands you can enter into GeekTool. Of course, you need to enter text the script Once you’ve done this, whatever command youĮntered will appear in the shell. When you press the red circle in the top left corner to exit, it will ask if you want to save the script. It will open a blank white screen with the heading Edit Script. Until everything has moved to Unicode, iconv is a handy command to know.Beside Command: and the blank white line are three little dots. 1 To get the degree symbol (°) displayed in GeekTool, I follow the procedure above and pipe it through iconv: ~/bin/temperature | iconv -s -f UTF-8 -t ISO_8859-1 Line 2 allows me to include UTF-8 characters directly in the Python source code, and the encode call in Line 8 prepares them for display in the Terminal. This is a much-abbreviated version of my weathertext script. 1: #!/usr/bin/pythonĦ: # Get the current temperature for the given station.ħ: noaa = pywapi.get_weather_from_noaa('KARR')Ĩ: print u'%.0f°'.encode('utf8') % float(noaa) The text is generated by running the following Python script, which is named temperature and is stored in my ~/bin/ folder. I’ve also added a new temperature display next to the time and date down in the lower left corner of the screen: I’ve done the same thing for displaying the current PandoraBoy track: osascript ~/bin/pandora-playing.scpt | iconv -s -f UTF-8 -t ISO_8859-1 The part before the pipe is what I’ve always used, the iconv switches tell it to convert from ( -f) UTF-8 to ( -t) ISO 8859-1, also known as Latin-1, and to keep silent ( -s) and continue the conversion if any errors arise. A bit of trial and error led me to this GeekTool shell command: osascript ~/bin/itunes-playing.scpt | iconv -s -f UTF-8 -t ISO_8859-1 The solution to this, which I should have implemented a long time ago, is to pipe the output of the AppleScript through iconv to convert the encoding from UTF-8 to whatever it is GeekTool wants. GeekTool 3 may work fine with UTF-8, but I’m not happy with its memory use or lack of stability, so I’m still using version 2.1.2.) Hence the funky characters in the track name. The AppleScript that generates the text is emitting UTF-8, and apparently GeekTool can’t handle it. One thing that’s always bothered me about my GeekTool setup for displaying the current iTunes track is that it doesn’t handle accented characters properly. I haven’t tested it myself, but Martin says it works for him, and on matters of international character sets I tend to trust someone with an ö in his name. Reader Martin Ström emailed me a link to this site, whose author has patched GeekTool 2.1.2 to display UTF-8 characters correctly.
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