Conky Thesis Progress Widget

This conky configuration displays a simple overview about your thesis progress (word count) as well as the remaining number of days until the deadline. I wrote it for my own MSc thesis and it helped to make the whole thing a lot more fun 😉

Dependencies

These instructions are for Ubuntu. Package names on other distributions may vary.

1. conky (>= 1.10): sudo apt-get install conky
2. exiftool: sudo apt-get install libimage-exiftool-perl
3. pdftotext: sudo apt-get install poppler-utils
4. FontAwesome: sudo apt-get install fonts-font-awesome
5. Purisa Font: sudo apt-get install fonts-tlwg-purisa

Installation

1. Copy the conky configuration to your home directory: cp conkyrc ~/.conkyrc
2. Make sure everything in scripts is executable and in your PATH

Setup

You will want to adapt 2 files:

• Change the path to the PDF file in .conkyrc
• Change the deadline date UNIX timestamp in .conkyrc
• Change the amount of start/end pages to skip in .conkyrc (parameters 1 and 2 to pdfWordCount)
• Change the word exclusion rules by adding/removing/adapting sed calls in pdfWordCount