wtf/_site/content/configuration/_index.md

title, date, draft, weight

title	date	draft	weight
Configuration	2018-04-15T21:17:16-07:00	false	5

Index

• Configuration Files
  • Example Configuration Files
  • Custom Configuration Files
  • Configuration Attributes
• Grid Layout

Configuration Files

By default WTF looks in a ~/.config/wtf/ directory for a YAML file called config.yml. If the ~/.config/wtf/ directory doesn't exist, WTF will create that directory on start-up, and then display instructions for creating a new configuration file.

In other words, WTF expects to have a YAML config file at: ~/.config/wtf/config.yml.

Example Configuration Files

A couple of example config files are provided in the _sample_configs/ directory of the Git repository.

To try out WTF quickly, copy simple_config.yml into ~/.config/wtf/ as config.yml and relaunch WTF. You should see the app launch and display the Security, Clocks and Status widgets onscreen.

Custom Configuration Files

To try out different configurations (or run multiple instances of WTF), you can pass the path to a config file via command line arguments on start-up.

To load a custom configuration file (ie: one that's not ~/.config/wtf/config.yml), pass in the path to configuration file as a parameter on launch:

    $> wtf --config=path/to/custom/config.yml

Configuration Attributes

A number of top-level attributes can be set to customize your WTF install. See Attributes for details.

Grid Layout

WTF uses the Grid layout system from tview to position widgets onscreen. It's not immediately obvious how this works, so here's an explanation:

Think of your terminal screen as a matrix of letter positions, say 100 chrs wide and 58 chrs tall.

Columns breaks up the width of the screen into chunks, each chunk a specified number of characters wide. use

[10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10]

Ten columns that are ten characters wide

Rows break up the height of the screen into chunks, each chunk a specified number of characters tall. If we wanted to have five rows:

[10, 10, 10, 10, 18]

The co-ordinate system starts at top-left and defines how wide and tall a widget is. If we wanted to put a 2-col, 2-row widget in the bottom of the screen, we'd position it at:

  top:    4  // top starts in the 4th row
  left:   9  // left starts in the 9th column
  height: 2  // span down rows 4 & 5 (18 characters in size, total)
  width:  2  // span across cols 9 & 10 (20 characters in size, total)