GeekTool

As a newish user to the mac world, there are some things that I really liked about windows, one of them was Rainmeter. It was a good desktop plugin with a lot of community driven themes for displaying all sorts of items. I have even had some friends that spent a night or two making their own theme.
I was looking for something simular in the Apple world, and found GeekTool. I have it display the time, weather batter status on my laptop. On my desktop it just displays the date.
Lets review the simple settings for it here

This is the default Apple menu bar. I mean seriously there is a lot of stuff on there, do I really need the admin module? The BlueTooth? Time Machine? I know how to get to the System Preferences, so no, I do not need all that stuff.


There we go, much better. Now you might ask what about the time?
Well lets get to that next. I happen to run dual screen at home, so it is not a big deal here to turn off the time on the menu bar.



With GeekTool, I can setup a simple location on the desktop to display the time and date.
I know what you are thinking, and that is "but it is right there in the menu bar, why would you want to change it?" The short answer to that is "because I can" but the better answer is, on my laptop the menu bar is not that long, it has a resolution of 1280x800, so every pixel of space up there is precious to me.

So here is how the time looks on my second screen.

Now we are going to get to the fun parts of this, the simple code behind.



There are two shells behind the date and time.
First one is for time, and the second shell is for the date. I wanted a larger font size for the time.
Time: date +%I:%M
Date: date +%A,%" "%d%n%B,%" "%Y 
And I think that is all I have for the night.