Hi
I haven't figured out how conky takes stdin. I can't find from the documents anything about outputting stdin stream, there are no variables[1] for that. I should have taken this to Conky's mailing lists first, but as I recall someone used conky with xmonad well. I couldn't find the post from archives, but maybe somebody pops up.
I'm using conky as a statusbar, you can see it here: http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Image:ComboP.png I found only one way to show messages there: using files. For example here's my urgency handling code: myPP = PP { ppCurrent = const "" , ppVisible = const "" , ppHidden = map toUpper , ppHiddenNoWindows = const "" , ppUrgent = map toLower , ppSep = "" , ppWsSep = " " , ppTitle = const "" , ppLayout = const "" , ppOrder = id , ppSort = getSortByIndex , ppExtras = [] , ppOutput = printUrgency } printUrgency :: String -> IO () printUrgency s = do h <- openFile "/home/kos/.conky/urgent" WriteMode hPutStrLn h (filter isLower s) hClose h (upper/lower case is a dumb way to filter out everything except urgency messages) and then in conkyrc: ${execi 5 cat /home/kos/.conky/urgent} I made a more versatile system on my laptop, with a single globally writable /tmp/message file. Anything written to it is shown for 5 seconds in my conky. Mostly used for messages like "laptop mode on", "wifi off", "LCD brightness 60%" written by udev/ACPI scripts