how to have a clock indicator highly visible?

Solution 1:

Use Conky.

It provides a few themes by default and more themes can be downloaded and installed.

Follow these steps:

1) Install Conky Manager, which provides a GUI that allows you to easily manage Conky configurations:

sudo apt-add-repository -y ppa:teejee2008/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install conky-manager

2) Create a conky config file this way:

$mkdir -vp ~/.conky/SimpleDateTimeClock
$cat >~/.conky/SimpleDateTimeClock/SimpleDatetimeClock.cfg

and paste this on it:

use_xft yes
xftfont Sans:style=Bold:size=10
own_window yes
own_window_hints undecorated,above,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager
own_window_colour darkblue
gap_x 10
gap_y 30
alignment top_right

TEXT
${color white}${execi 1 date +"%H:%M"}${color grey}${execi 1 date +":%S"}${color yellow}${execi 1 date +" %d"}${color cyan}${execi 1 date +" %b"}

Important: there must have no NEWLINE character at the last line or it will be rendered on conky. So the last line must be the one of execi commands.

This minimal config is based on this example.

3) Activate it on Conky Manager, and on its settings, enable the clock to be run on startup.