Put a digital clock in a corner of the screen with GeekTool

Sep 12, '12 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

Since Lion, I love using my always-open apps (Chrome and iTunes) in full-screen mode, but I want to know what time is it without using the mouse or keyboard. I figured out a way to do it using a widget with GeekTool.

Making the widget
Open the application and drag a new Shell element onto the desktop. Edit it in the Properties window in this way:
In the Command section, insert date + followed without spaces by one of these commands:
%R or %H:%M to have a 24h clock;
%l:%M to have a 12h clock (put " "%p after your text if you want to show am/pm).
After that, check Keep on Top and set 1 (or less frequent value) in the Refresh every X s text field.
Now you can customize all the other properties as you want, like font, color and background; I like to use it in Lucida Grande 14 pt (the same as the system digital clock in the menu bar).

Download the widget
If you want, you can download my Geeklet by right-clicking on this text and selecting "Save link as...". It has enabled a white shadow that makes it visible over dark pages without having to set a opaque light background.

[kirkmc adds: Back in the day, I used GeekTool a lot. I didn't know it was on the Mac App Store, so if only for that, it's worth looking at. It's come a long way since I last used it, with some really interesting possibilities and much easier configuration.]

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Mac OS X Hints
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