Again, I have come to the blinding realization that Nerdtool is not doing what I want it to. I was sitting the other day, wondering why Nerdtool wasn't running on my desktop. I had many scripts to give me great information in a spectacular format with friendly, readable text; but, for some reason, Nerdtool wasn't running. Log files, dynamic images, beautifully crafted sed expressions that could be put into a classic Rolex timepiece; but I
was not using any of it. Curiously, I opened the application and saw my scripts flourish over my desktop, providing the best dashboard experience one could ever hope for. I enabled the program, then went about business as usual, using expose to get information at-a-glance. Life was good, until I had to use Terminal.
I pulled open Terminal to look for some runaway process, and I was stricken by what I found. I now remembered why I had turned off Nerdtool. The PIDs for the lastest processes were around 30,000. Whoa. It seems that creating and destroying a bash process every 5 seconds causes the PID count to ramp up to astronomical numbers in a relatively short amount of time. This is simply unacceptable.
I am no professional the hard inner workings of the kernel, but my intuition tells me that this is a bad thing. Such processes that are short-lived and numerous can't be good (or efficient) for the system. It would be much better to do the scripts local to the application (in C) rather than externally (in bash). In fact, this is what Conky, the Linux Geektool, both suggests and does.
In this light, I am going to try and make Nerdtool more like Conky. I'm putting the original Nerdtool on hold at the moment and working on something a little more bare. The new Nerdtool, Nerdtool Stats (NTS for short), will have a very minimal interface; there will be no graphical elements to help format your logs. In fact, there is only one "log" so to speak. And, you configure this log with a basic text file. Go look at some conkyrc files, and that's basically what it's going to look like.
This branch should make NerdTool very slim, simple, and customizable. Do you think this is a good idea? Do you like the traditional Geektool approach as opposed to the Conky one?
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3 comments postedI'm new to NerdTool but have been using GeekTool since it's beginnings and UNIX for several decades before that.
There's nothing inherently wrong with running up the process ID; that's what UNIX is designed to do. (I can't talk to NT's use of resources, although I'll install it now as GT isn't working well under Lion DP3.)
There are also some simple tweaks that can be added to asl.conf for users of specific things in the syslog stream - ping me if you want some details that really lift the load when checking out Console traffic.
Most interested in what happens next, :-)
Mickey
EDIT: IMHO you're barking up the wrong tree. Corky is just another view of system resources and usage, much like iStat Menus does. That's a problem that's been done. It looks flashy, shares a bit of well-defined info, but completely lacks the flexibility and utility that comes from being able to specify ad hoc shell commands. If you want to re-invent this go ahead and make it pretty and powerful, but don't muck with the general utility of NerdTool. Please.
Kevin,
I just want to throw in my support for your efforts. As it is, I still use NerdTool, preferring it over GeekTool.
I'm not familiar with Conky, but I hope your new NerdTool will be able to accommodate the desktop information customizations that we do to pull and display information from various sources...
...AND retain your great NerdTool graphical layout approach! A tall order I am sure...
When you're ready for beta testers, please let me know!
Appreciate all your efforts,
Steven
I realize this is pretty late compared to when you posted this but as I just created an account to give you my opinion I hope you will read this.
I agree with you completely that NerdTool takes up to much system resources and although I know near to nothing about coding and I can't comment on Conky, but going bare seems like a good idea as it is bound to decrease the overall footprint and will make the app useable. Even though NT takes less resources than GT as it is, they both consume more than need be and I am super glad to read that your aware and most importantly interested in finding a way to "re-introduce" NT with a speedier framework. Thanks for your contribution and we all appreciate you not settling and looking to re-write NT so it works the way you want, the way we all want.
Cheers for being honest, admitting the apps faults, and pushing to make a new version that will be more efficient. Again, thank you.