1 What is adesklets?

1.1 Short answer

adesklets is an interactive Imlib2 console for the X Window system. It provides scripted languages with a clean and simple way to write great looking, mildly interactive desktop integrated graphic applets (aka “desklets”).

It can also be used as a command line oriented graphic editor, a bit similar to ImageMagick , but with different functionality.

1.2 Long answer

adesklets stands for “another desklets [container]”. It was written as an alternative to other programs such as:

1. gDesklets (http://gdesklets.gnomedesktop.org/)
2. SuperKaramba (http://netdragon.sourceforge.net/).
3. GKrellM (http://www.gkrellm.net/)

Since this is 'a'desklets, others still have plenty of space to start similar projets, from 'b'desklets to 'z', excluding 'g', which is already taken.

Seriously though, all those packages are nice. Nevertheless, the first two have very heavy requirements in terms of library dependencies; basically, gDesklets still requires a fair part of the GNOME environment to be installed (plus specialized libraries such as gnome-python¹), while SuperKaramba needs almost all of the KDE libraries and base environment. This also reflects on performance for the task at hand². On the other hand, while GKrellM is significantly lighter (it still depends on GTK+ though), it does not deliver the same experience in terms of “eye-candiness” (to the author's taste, of course) or “scriptability” than the other two.

Thus, adesklets was born. It provides:

• a minimal framework for X Window desklets seamlessly integrated into the desktop, with an easy to use central management for starting, positioning and stopping them.
• a generic, rich and easy to use drawing API similar to gDesklets and SuperKaramba regarding its high visual quality, thanks to the Imlib2 library.
• very limited library dependencies: uses the very good (and lightning fast) Imlib2 library for all graphic-related operations. No window toolkit used whatsoever; the program relies directly on xlib.
• a light, robust and small interpreter potentially usable with all sorts of scripting languages thanks to a clean, limited and homogenous syntax. As on version 0.4.8, support for Python is provided out of the box. Future support for Perl and Ruby is planned. Feel free to contribute support for your favorite language!
• Minimal disk space, memory footprint and CPU usage. Typically, on glibc 2.3.4 Linux 2.6 x86, a unique executable is less than 130 KB on disk, takes less than 3 MB of virtual memory per desklet right after initialization, and almost no processor cycles (including cycles from a Python interpreted script) when idle.

It DOES NOT provide:

• A sophisticated window API, or even access to widgets besides bare, ugly grey menus. You clearly cannot write any GUI application with this–only “desklets”.
• Convoluted mechanisms (or just plain mechanisms, for that matter) for script configuration. Script developers are free (or doomed, depending on how you see things) to do whatever they see fit.
• Support for everything that is not a truly POSIX compliant system. For instance, it would be very surprising if this would ever compile on Cygwin.
• Feature-rich management of user events. adesklets aims at low resource consumption and reliability; only a small set of events, mainly pointer-related, are exposed through its API.