TextMon

A Do It Yourself textual system monitor, meant to be an entry point for you coding kde plasma applets in JavaScript.

By default it shows:

{cpu: %}{mem: MB}{wlan: KB/s d | KB/s u}{sda: KB/s r | KB/s w}

You most likely want to tweak the settings right away, like changing the text color to black if your theme is light or monitor eth0 rather than wlan0. This is, of course, done by editing the source code. The settings dialog shows you how to get there. The following page shows a number of examples of how to customize TextMon

http://maikbeckmann.github.com/plasma-textmon/hacking-textmon.html

To go beyond just tweaking TextMon and gain some insight, take a look at its home page

http://maikbeckmann.github.com/plasma-textmon/

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Additional Links
Github repo: http://github.com/MaikBeckmann/plasma-textmon/
Main source file: http://github.com/MaikBeckmann/plasma-textmon/blob/master/textmon/contents/code/main.js

The content of my main.js http://paste.kde.org/425714/ and its diff to main.js in master http://paste.kde.org/425726/. It monitors the same values as the default, but renders them in a shorter way:
%|MB|KB/s d KB/s u|KB/s r KB/s w

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feedback
@zeltak regarding mpd (updated 2012-02-25): Replace TextMon's main.js with this http://paste.kde.org/428840/ and see if and how it works for you. If you want to make a TextMdpMon copy the TextMon dir to some place (i.e. ~/Projects/TextMpdMon/), replace the main.js with the paste (if you haven't already) and metadata.desktop with http://paste.kde.org/428732/ . See http://maikbeckmann.github.com/plasma-textmon/prelude.html#sec-3 on how to install it.

- 2012-02-19 So :: 1.0 -- Much better Javascript in main.js

- 2012-02-14 Di :: 0.11 -- Added links to docs and sources to settings dialog.

- 2012-02-09 Do :: 0.1 -- Initial upload.