Continuing with the theme of pimping various aspects of the OS X system configuration, today’s article covers how to use GeekTool 3 to display useful info on your OS X desktop. For those that missed it, one of my recent articles, "Pimp My Prompt … like Paul Irish covered using the .bash_profile script to add some geek bling to your bash prompt – check it out.
The idea of GeekTool is to use the often under-utilised desktop area of OS X to display useful info. Some people use it to display images but most use it to run Bash shell commands to interrogate and display various system-level statistics. For example, my desktop looks like this (click for larger version):
Before you ask, the desktop background is an InterfaceLift image called The Solutionist. 🙂
Now, I’m going to assume that you’ve already downloaded and installed GeekTool 3 from the GeekTool homepage. If you haven’t done that already, do it now, please.
Once you’ve got it installed, open System Preferences and click the GeekTool preference pane that should now be available. For this article, please drag a "Shell" Geeklet onto your desktop. Configure it any way you’d like in terms of position – for the sake of comparison, the screenshot below shows the settings for my date and weather Geeklet.
