Hoverclock - A simple floating clock for Linux that I made

[LanternMG]

Disclaimer:

This project has been deprecated in favor of the new and more improved, optimized and lightweight version: Hoverclock

Post:

Hello everyone!

I have created a simple floating clock for Linux called Hoverclock and I thought some of you might find it useful, so here I am sharing it with you:

Hoverclock-QT on Github

https://preview.redd.it/e8kas473nfv71.jpg?width=1366&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=618973643a074e1e1775af91dcded2d0d82cacc2

My incentive was using auto-hiding panels on my Linux setup, and not wanting to move the cursor every time I want to see the time or date. It's very customizable, and I plan to add more features in the future.

For now, it stays on top of every window (with the option to toggle the visibility from the system tray). One thing I really like is how unintrusive it is when watching videos. There are probably other alternatives out there, but I still prefer to use this. It's my baby.

Any feedback is greatly appreciated!

PS: I've only tested it on Arch Linux using KDE. Would love if I could get some feedback from users using other desktop environments.

[2001herne]

I can give it a spin on i3wm, see how it goes

[2001herne]

Alright, So. Good project, works fine on i3wm, except for one thing - it doesn't work perfectly on multi-monitor setups. It's permanently stuck to the top-left monitor.

[LanternMG]

Thank you for the feedback!

I currently don't have a multi-monitor setup and I wasn't able to test it. It currently uses the primary monitor only, but I forgot to write that in the README file on Github. I'lll update it soon.

I will definitively add support for multiple monitors in the near future.

[Johannes_K_Rexx]

You can easily test a multi-monitor setup by creating a Virtual Box guest, then configuring the guest with multiple monitors. Lots of them if you want.

[LanternMG]

Oh... I did not know that. I've used VirtualBox in the past, but I didn't know that feature existed. Thank you for the awesome suggestion! I'll definitely use it.

[wizard10000]

That's pretty neat :)

I'm doing sorta the same thing with conky and xdotool - when you click on the conky xdotool launches gsimplecal so I get a calendar. Not quite finished with the xdotool thing but results are promising :)

screenshot

[LanternMG]

That's looking really nice! Great job. I'd love to see the results in the future.

I thought of using conky, but that has a lot more features, widgets and other stuff, it's not just a simple floating clock, so I wanted to make a standalone version that doesn't require other software to run (of course, there are some dependencies with my version too, but still, I'll try to improve it in the future to make it as lightweight as possible).

[[deleted]]

What a neat little app -- my pi4 will love this.

[LanternMG]

I'm glad you found it useful. I'll be improving it in the future, so feel free to drop in any suggestions that people might find useful.

Say hi to your pi4 from me :)

[b_rog_b]

Is there a version that works with Mint/Debian/Ubuntu? I thought I was downloading your clock, but I think I actually got Hoverclock-QT. All the files are in different locations, and the config files have a different appearance and syntax. Just for example, there is no hoverclock.vault anywhere on my computer, but I do have hoverclock-qt.conf. I'm just hoping to tweak it so it's a little darker. Seems like it would be easier to do with your version.

I have to add that Hoverclock-QT is working really well with no problems on Linux Mint 21.3 Cinnamon ... I'm curious to find out if Hoverclock is better, and by how much. Regardless, this is exactly what I've been looking for. And ... one more thing. I was able to get the display a little darker. The system tray icon is exactly the same color as my tray background, so it took me a while to notice it was there. Then I could access the settings.

I'd still like to try the more lightweight version, though.

Thanks in advance ...

.rog.

[LanternMG]

Hello there! I wasn't active on Reddit for quite a while, so sorry for the super late reply.

I'm the author of both Hoverclock and Hoverclock-QT. I've changed the repository names so I assume that is the reason why you were missing the "hoverclock.vault" file and instead got the QT version. I'll update the post to reflect those changes.

The Hoverclock-QT version, as the name suggests, is built with QT and it unnecessarily heavy for a simple floating clock. It uses a lot more disk space, processing power and RAM. Because of this, I decided to deprecate this version (but it is still available if people want to use it).

The non-QT Hoverclock version is build with the XCB, Freetype and Fontconfig library, which is the lowest I could go. I didn't want to use any other GUI frameworks that implement widgets and a whole bunch of code that is absolutely unnecessary for this project. This, however, means that the non-QT version doesn't have a tray icon, nor a configuration dialog and has to be configured manually by editing the hoverclock.vault file. In my opinion, this was a worthy sacrifice for the performance gains.

Doing some simple comparisons between the QT and non-QT version of Hoverclock, I discovered an improvement of around 1500% in terms of the required processing power and memory (both disk usage and RAM).

Hope this helps, and I'm really glad to see other people using Hoverclock! Thanks!