Fed up of a plain boring desktop? Well I was to until i was browsing Mac forums and stumbled on a thread about Geektool. Geektool is basically a ‘.prefpane’ which you set up widget’s which are shell scripts, images or files on your PC. These then are showed on top of your desktop background. Below are some of the scripts I use with Geektool.

To display my computer information (computer name, os details, ram and processor) I use the code:

scutil --get ComputerName;
sw_vers | awk -F':\t' '{print $2}' | paste -d ' ' - - - ;
sysctl -n hw.memsize | awk '{print $0/1073741824"gb RAM"}';
sysctl -n machdep.cpu.brand_string;

For the date and time I used the following codes:

date +%d

For numerical value of the day.

date +%B

For name of month.

date +%H:%M

For time (hours:minutes).

date +%A

For the day.

For the harddrive information (just replace disk0s1 with the drive number and partition you want to show) I used the following code:

df -hl | grep 'disk0s1' |
awk '{print $4 " free " "("$2")"}' |
sed s/Gi/gb/g

Also with icalBuddy you can have it display uncompleted tasks, upcoming events and much more on your desktop all form your iCal calendar. The script below is for tasks that need to be done:

/usr/local/bin/icalBuddy uncompletedTasks

This script is for upcoming events in your calendar in the next 31 days:

/usr/local/bin/icalBuddy eventsToday+31

To get any text label just create a script and insert the text you want between the speech marks.

echo " "

Last Modified : November 15th, 2009 Filed under : Mac Navigate : / Next post