Linux generic dashboard for desktop

Question

I am looking for generic dashboard for linux desktop.

Example what I have in mind:

• list of new emails (from Mutt)
• list of urgent tasks (from Taskwarrior)
• list of notifications (from Dunst)
• status indicators of running servers and websites
• services information (people online, uptime)
• calendar (wyrd, google calendar)
• tail logs
• system resources indicator (not required can use separate tool like conky)

It should be only tool to work with data. Formating, history, scrolling.

It should have built in widgets for list(history/scrooling), on/off indicators, value indicators.

It should be very easy to add thing to it. Ideally some markup language for dashboard design. Where you would specify widget(which one + its options) and how to get data for it. (i.e.: xml, yaml)

Since it will be refreshing in very short interval (1-5sec) it should be writen in some fast language. And it should take very litle resources. Which makes good candidates C/C++ and Go.

On the other hand using some web based tool allows you to reuse the tool in many non-desktop cases. However for now I seem to favor fast and light on resources.

Would be nice if it has decupled things. i.e. You could have ncurses frontend in terminal and some graphical for x. However terminal version is prefered.

Software I already looked at and didn't accept.

• Conky - terrible layouting
• Hubble - no "widgets" / plain text
• Dashing - JavaScript?

Answer 1

A rising star with awesome ASCII/ANSI "graphics" - https://github.com/yaronn/blessed-contrib . I have only tried the demo, and I am stunned.

Let's go through it item by item:

• Widgets: line chart, bar chart, map, gauge (value indicator), rolling log (history list), picture, sparkline chart, table. No simple on/off indicator as of now.

• Language: JavaScript. Platform: Node.js (I hope it would work under io.js as well, considering I have not found any native binary deps in the tree).

• Resource usage: you should try and see if it fits your use case. No personal advice here.

• Layout: grids. There's an open issue on GitHub with the author promising automatic resizing of the dashboard in the future (e.g. when you change the size of the xterm/konsole window).

• No separate layout language. Can't see it as a large disadvantage, since one has to plug in the code for the source of data anyway.