Dynamic Display of System Info on Desktop

[Mantene]

Summary of the new feature/enhancement

There is a tool in Sysinternals called BGInfo. It works... kind of. It is rather outdated and clunky. It would be nice to have a powertoy that allowed us to add dynamic system information to the desktop background. Something that updated periodically.

For example, it might be useful to see the memory usage, drive free space, ip address, logged-in user, and maybe the cpu usage at a glance on the desktop.

[crutkas]

#834 would be something also we could display.

[DanEdens]

IMO It's not exactly in the scope of this project.
It's very do-able with already established programs such as Rainmeter.
BGinfo doesn't update dynamically and I'd bet that's why it wasn't worth maintaining.
Rainmeter is fairly advanced compared to that method, and is maintained. Lua is a great platform to accomplish this on. Fast, lightweight and growing rapidly as a language.

I can help point you in the right direction on editing skins to suit your needs if you want, but there is a vast array of templates to play with.
You can read about measures here: 'https://docs.rainmeter.net/manual/measures/'

lol Really you could just use imagemagick cli to overlay env variables onto your wallpaper and reload the image. I might have to play with that idea a bit.

[crutkas]

that is a good question, is rainmeter a fantastic product and we should just point at that in our readme?

[DanEdens]

I believe one of the most important concepts in coding is to "stand on the backs of Giants". Trying to reinvent every wheel on every platform bogs down your progression. Truly just trying to help tho.

It might drive me a bit crazy when every question I see asked on stack is immediately followed with "duplicate question: lol bye" but it only hurts because they aren't wrong.

[Mantene]

I would prefer not to run rainmeter - it seems to have to run constantly. However, @DanEdens, your suggestion of using imagemagick is actually fantastic! Thank you! Feel free to close this if it isn't going to add to this project. I am going to run with your suggestion!

[DanEdens]

I'd be interested in seeing what comes of it! Tag me if you post anything in future. Cheers

[Jay-o-Way]

At quick look related to #3096

[crutkas]

This would be the implementation of the feature from #1354 and #3096 is basically asking for more sysinternal items to be open sourced. different but same.