I happened to notice that there's activity on fbpanel on github from just a few days ago, so I took the opportunity to port my old patch to the current version of fbpanel and create a pull request: https://github.com/aanatoly/fbpanel/pull/19
This is basically identical to what I posted here. When you replied to my bug report in November, 2011 (!), you asked for a configuration example, which I never provided. There's one in the pull request to upstream, but I'll repeat what I put there. The pull request includes an image as well. Given this configuration fragment: Plugin { type = genmon config { Command = get_qbiff_output AllowPangoMarkup = 1 PollingTime = 1 MaxTextLength = 500 } } this text: <tt><span size='larger' foreground='red'>● </span><span foreground='red'>A</span> <span foreground='red'>Q</span> <span foreground='#266522'>v</span> <span foreground='#266522'>/vsm</span><span size='larger' foreground='red'> ●</span></tt> Generates ● A Q v /vsm ● in a fixed-width font with the bullets and upper-case letters in red and the lower-case letters in green. I'm not sure whether upstream is actually going to release 7.0 or whether it will include my patch. I just keep patching fbpanel and using a patched version. I don't run a graphical desktop on that many systems, so this is not a huge deal for me.... -- Jay Berkenbilt <q...@debian.org>