This looks like a clone of iStat Menus which I had installed for years and years till one day I realized I basically never look at it and the icons were just taking up space in my menu bar. I finally un-installed it.
The activity monitor in my dock set to show CPU is sufficient for my needs.
the one I use most often is about://peformance in Firefox
I used to open up Activity Monitor, but every single time my laptop fans kick on, it was the browser. with the browser performance monitor, i can see exactly which tab is being naughty. So now, I skip Activity Monitor and go straight to the source. Usually, a cmd-R on the offending tab brings it back under control. I assume some JS dev has not tested their code by having it running in a tab for an amount of time other than how long it takes to test their changes.
I was finally persuaded to subscribe to Setapp. I had already paid for licenses to most of the software on Setapp, but as I have more and more of them roll into a “free” upgrade, I definitely think it’s worthwhile.
I'm using an old version of iStat Menus, works fine. I did try Stat but the text in the menu bar is too thin for my eyes, and the developer wasn't receptive to my PR that addressed the issue. Which is fine. But makes the app not for me.
TIL you can show useful stats with 'Activity Monitor.app' right in the dock by right clicking the icon and selecting from the 'Dock Icon' menu item. Thanks!
Cool. I used to pay for iStat Menus, but one day I got a new laptop and couldn't figure out how to download the old version I had bought a license for.
IMO it's essential to see cpu / mem / network consumption at all times and, on top of that, the top 5 apps consuming each one of them. It should be a default feature of computing devices by now, but it's so far from that which only benefits bad actors (resource hogs, bad software). I shouldn't have to launch activity monitor every time I want such basic info.
I've used Stats for years and loved it -- for CPU, GPU, memory, and network upload/download speeds.
It's fantastic for catching when a bunch of processes haven't been killed and are stuck at 100%. For figuring out if my code is actually running on the GPU or not. For seeing what my network transfer rates are, when a download or transfer gets stuck, and which process is suddenly downloading hundreds of megabytes without telling me?
It gives me the security I have a top-level overview of what my computer's up to. Can't imagine my menubar without it.
I've been using iPulse (https://ipulseapp.com/) for about twenty years now. It gets consistent compliments and questions from shoulder-surfers because it looks great, and it doesn't take much screen real estate. No affiliation, strong recommendation.
I brew installed but it didn't come up in my menubar. Just restarted my Mac and now I see it. I'm too lazy to make a PR to update the docs though right now.
Edit: I just see the battery widget not any of the other ones. This is a confusing onboarding experience.
Edit2: ah, they were all hidden because of Macs crap UX on menubar space. No indication there are more menu item. What a poor design decision Mac.
I would be very careful with using Bartender now. It was a great app, but recently bought by a shady company known for buying apps to milk them for money and user data. I recommend Ice, as linked by Khaine, which is open source, free, and works like a charme.
wasn’t deep or nun, lowkey just wanted to help, learned this terminal thingy here fs
I have a system prompt for haiku to convert messages to genz slang. I use it to confuse friends with it sometimes and we have a laugh. I had the instructions somewhere stored and just wanted to rewrite them before posting them here because I am paranoid and did not remember if i posted them verbatim in another place with another username.
I know this is not really the place for this sort of thing, but if some people smiled a bit I am good with that
Totally off topic, but it's funny how much of "modern" slang (whatever the generation) is present in hip hop culture years before. I noticed that when "twerk" became a thing; I remembered songs about twerking from years before that.
In this case, the term "bet": I remembered hearing that for the first time in the late 1980s in a song by Fresh Prince (Will Smith): "... bet, well let's go then..." (As We Go, 1988)
I've tried Stats over the years as the project has evolved and I keep coming back to iStat Menus. Stats feels very inspired by iStats Menus's design as well. The one thing I appreciate about Stats though is support more SMC sensor values.
I had a neat program like this for Windows in the early 2000s. Got it from a Microsoft engineer who unfortunately I lost contact with. It must have been the lightest-weight resource monitor program to have ever existed for Windows NT, 2000, CE, and XP. Basically it took the Task Manager's resource meters, displayed them transparently, and set them on the upper-right corner of the screen.
Same as hombre_fatal - I used to use iStats Menus, but no need any longer. This is great. I'm watching multiple SSDs activity, network activity, cpu, memory, etc.
Windows doesn't have a programmable equivalent does it? Last time I messed around with this stuff I got by with an Electron app and using browser desktop notifications but I think I couldn't actually modify the taskbar/put icons somewhere.
Electron is overkill, but it can be quite lightweight with something like Tauri as it doesn't bundle another browser and uses the default web renderer.
I like that I was able to style these with a super minimal theme in my menu bar that gives me a glance at what my system is up to and if it's outside normal parameters.
Have been using this for about a year now without issue.
Are there any equivalents that work in Windows 11? There were a handful that worked in previous versions of Windows but lots of them won't work in W11 and those that say they do are risky installs.
I swapped from stats to iStats a few years ago. I've found stats to be easier to customize and the UI is more uniform. That said, it doesn't have the weather widget, so I've kept iStats around solely for its weather functionality.
thanks. now i'm wondering why it hasn't been pestering me to upgrade. i just went and looked, and now it sees the upgrade possible. i must have told it later and promptly forgot about it
I needed something like stats back when RAM was an issue on my MacBook 2011 (I installed 16Gb even so 8 was the official max from Apple) and the n during the 2020ish years before my first M series to figure out why my fans started to act up. Now I also only need to figure out what eats Batterie.
I need it on apple silicon for the opposite reason, because there is basically no feedback from the computer if something is eating all then resources. Eg sometimes something eats my ram and it starts swapping and I do not even notice.
Aww yeah, I’ve been rocking menu meters for almost a decade now. I can’t believe people get by without a bandwidth meter at least, so helpful for so many reasons
I've just switched, mainly it works 100% while some menumeter sensors do not show up on the menu bar for me. The drop down menu is also much more informative and modern with charts.
Interesting to see MacOS users finally get an option like this. KDE Plasma has this for the past 5+ years, you can even create little custom reporting widgets with various system information and different chart designs.
I love the way KDE handles system monitor widgets, especially nowadays. It's great for people that want to make graphs with desperate sensors like plotting your CPU temp against your GPU temp or your IO speed with your network speed.
Because programs can not register an icon to minimize the apps to the menubar app while providing core functionality and info via a context menu and tooltips, at least AFAIK.
This looks like a clone of iStat Menus which I had installed for years and years till one day I realized I basically never look at it and the icons were just taking up space in my menu bar. I finally un-installed it.
The activity monitor in my dock set to show CPU is sufficient for my needs.
the one I use most often is about://peformance in Firefox
I used to open up Activity Monitor, but every single time my laptop fans kick on, it was the browser. with the browser performance monitor, i can see exactly which tab is being naughty. So now, I skip Activity Monitor and go straight to the source. Usually, a cmd-R on the offending tab brings it back under control. I assume some JS dev has not tested their code by having it running in a tab for an amount of time other than how long it takes to test their changes.
do you mean `about:processes`?
`about://performance` doesn't work at least from my FF, but `about:performance` redirects to `about:processes`
yes. about:performance
the // was just muscle memory/brain fart/oops
i never really noticed it redirected to processes.
It's also often just ads, and installing a blocker helps
blockers are fully engaged. it's not definitely not ads.
I found iStatsMenu also destabilized my system. I’d get random kernel panics, while it was running.
It may have been just one of the display modules, as I didn’t use the default set, but I never felt like tracking it down, so I uninstalled it.
Every now and then, I try reinstalling it, but it still crashes the system. Not a big deal. Just eye candy.
It is indeed a clone of iStat Menus. But a very good one, which I discovered when I got tired of paying for the yearly upgrade to iStat.
I was finally persuaded to subscribe to Setapp. I had already paid for licenses to most of the software on Setapp, but as I have more and more of them roll into a “free” upgrade, I definitely think it’s worthwhile.
I'm using an old version of iStat Menus, works fine. I did try Stat but the text in the menu bar is too thin for my eyes, and the developer wasn't receptive to my PR that addressed the issue. Which is fine. But makes the app not for me.
TIL you can show useful stats with 'Activity Monitor.app' right in the dock by right clicking the icon and selecting from the 'Dock Icon' menu item. Thanks!
Cool. I used to pay for iStat Menus, but one day I got a new laptop and couldn't figure out how to download the old version I had bought a license for.
IMO it's essential to see cpu / mem / network consumption at all times and, on top of that, the top 5 apps consuming each one of them. It should be a default feature of computing devices by now, but it's so far from that which only benefits bad actors (resource hogs, bad software). I shouldn't have to launch activity monitor every time I want such basic info.
I'll try this out.
> IMO it's essential to see cpu / mem / network consumption at all times
Why?
At minimum, to just develop a sense of how the computer loads and de-loads as various services or programs are called
Could you please it put it in the store? Or add to brew?
Did you look at the readme? It’s right there at the top dude.
Unfortunately worse and not as compact/configurable as the paid iStat menu option, and that's something the dev doesn't want to change...
Well it’s free so…
I've used Stats for years and loved it -- for CPU, GPU, memory, and network upload/download speeds.
It's fantastic for catching when a bunch of processes haven't been killed and are stuck at 100%. For figuring out if my code is actually running on the GPU or not. For seeing what my network transfer rates are, when a download or transfer gets stuck, and which process is suddenly downloading hundreds of megabytes without telling me?
It gives me the security I have a top-level overview of what my computer's up to. Can't imagine my menubar without it.
I've been using iPulse (https://ipulseapp.com/) for about twenty years now. It gets consistent compliments and questions from shoulder-surfers because it looks great, and it doesn't take much screen real estate. No affiliation, strong recommendation.
I brew installed but it didn't come up in my menubar. Just restarted my Mac and now I see it. I'm too lazy to make a PR to update the docs though right now.
Edit: I just see the battery widget not any of the other ones. This is a confusing onboarding experience.
Edit2: ah, they were all hidden because of Macs crap UX on menubar space. No indication there are more menu item. What a poor design decision Mac.
Open source and especially free open source apps probably don't care too much about the "onboarding experience".
Yeah, it's really bad UX how icons simply don't show up if there's no room on macOS. There should at least be a spillover.
Back in the day I paid for https://www.macbartender.com/ to get these features.
You can also use Ice[1], which does the same thing and is open source
[1] https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice
Looks like the features are very similar. Is there anything the commercial product does that the open source doesn't?
I've used both, and I think Bartender was a little more polished, UI wise.
I would be very careful with using Bartender now. It was a great app, but recently bought by a shady company known for buying apps to milk them for money and user data. I recommend Ice, as linked by Khaine, which is open source, free, and works like a charme.
Thanks, I'm totally gonna try that!
weird, they all appeared for me
Alright, bet. Wanna make your Mac menu bar less clunky? Here’s the tea. Pop these commands in your terminal to tighten it up:
Changed your mind? No cap, just undo it with these: Then, log out and back in. Boom, you’re golden.This makes me cringe. No one talks like that
No-one you know, old person.
What’s the slang about? The OP doesn’t seem to be using any slang or colloquialisms. I thought it was funny but I don’t think I fully got the joke.
wasn’t deep or nun, lowkey just wanted to help, learned this terminal thingy here fs
I have a system prompt for haiku to convert messages to genz slang. I use it to confuse friends with it sometimes and we have a laugh. I had the instructions somewhere stored and just wanted to rewrite them before posting them here because I am paranoid and did not remember if i posted them verbatim in another place with another username.
I know this is not really the place for this sort of thing, but if some people smiled a bit I am good with that
Totally off topic, but it's funny how much of "modern" slang (whatever the generation) is present in hip hop culture years before. I noticed that when "twerk" became a thing; I remembered songs about twerking from years before that.
In this case, the term "bet": I remembered hearing that for the first time in the late 1980s in a song by Fresh Prince (Will Smith): "... bet, well let's go then..." (As We Go, 1988)
It’s pretty close to this meme from like a year ago:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1963h4k/cs...
It's like ZoomerGPT or something. I actually needed a smile so i appreciated it.
Ick
stickin out ya notch for the rizzler
I've been for many years a happily paying customer of iStat Menus [1], from which this seem to be the heavily inspired of.
[1] https://bjango.com/mac/istatmenus/
++ to this rec.
I've tried Stats over the years as the project has evolved and I keep coming back to iStat Menus. Stats feels very inspired by iStats Menus's design as well. The one thing I appreciate about Stats though is support more SMC sensor values.
I paid for it, and paid for one upgrade, but stats looks like it covers all of what I am interested in.
I've lost count of how many years I've owned a Bjango license. Amazing software.
One, two, three…Christ, 16 years here. This made me feel terrible. Thanks!
Been using stats for 4 years now, never had any issue with it. why pay when something free and open source is available.
Heh, I installed this and immediately found out that "LegacyScreenSaver" has leaked 40 GB of memory.
are you on a work laptop? A lot of times they have screensavers for intel arch, and apple silicon might have something to do with this problem
No, it's my personal laptop and the screensaver is definitely native (ARM). It's probably just Apple being sloppy again.
I have happily used the free Stats app for a couple of years now.
Hey iStat users, what makes the paid tool worth it for you?
Neat little app, but it made bluetoothd go bananas on my CPU, chewing up to 40% (M2 MBA here)
That is explained in the FAQ, apparently the bt module is inefficient but you can disable it.
I disabled the module but it still chews up a lot of CPU.
Stats + Hidden Bar + Brave are my first 3 downloads on any new Mac
I did not know about Hidden Bar, will try that out! I've been using Bartender for a long time but that is not free.
I haven't heard about Hidden Bar before, but https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice is quite nice.
I had a neat program like this for Windows in the early 2000s. Got it from a Microsoft engineer who unfortunately I lost contact with. It must have been the lightest-weight resource monitor program to have ever existed for Windows NT, 2000, CE, and XP. Basically it took the Task Manager's resource meters, displayed them transparently, and set them on the upper-right corner of the screen.
reminds me of power tools
Same as hombre_fatal - I used to use iStats Menus, but no need any longer. This is great. I'm watching multiple SSDs activity, network activity, cpu, memory, etc.
what's the advantage of this over something like btop?
This is glanceable from (and permanently resident in) the status bar and isn’t a TUI app. Although one may not see those as advantages…
Windows doesn't have a programmable equivalent does it? Last time I messed around with this stuff I got by with an Electron app and using browser desktop notifications but I think I couldn't actually modify the taskbar/put icons somewhere.
I don't know about programmable, but hwInfo used to be pretty popular on Windows for monitoring temps/hd/CPU/etc.
https://www.hwinfo.com
yeah I just meant in general not specific to hw info
using an Electron app for this just feels like a 30lb sledge to drive in a finishing nail.
Electron is overkill, but it can be quite lightweight with something like Tauri as it doesn't bundle another browser and uses the default web renderer.
I like that I was able to style these with a super minimal theme in my menu bar that gives me a glance at what my system is up to and if it's outside normal parameters.
Have been using this for about a year now without issue.
I've used XRG (free) from gaucho.software through many changes of hardware CPU numbers and macOS versions. Light and fluffy, for me at least.
Are there any equivalents that work in Windows 11? There were a handful that worked in previous versions of Windows but lots of them won't work in W11 and those that say they do are risky installs.
I’m being lazy (am an iStats user), has anyone here compared the two?
I swapped from stats to iStats a few years ago. I've found stats to be easier to customize and the UI is more uniform. That said, it doesn't have the weather widget, so I've kept iStats around solely for its weather functionality.
I assume you mean you went iStats -> stats
A weather widget is built-in to macOS now.
System Settings > Control Center > Weather
argh!! why oh why does mine not have this??? Sequoia 15.1.1
It comes with Sequoia 15.2.
I am still on 15.1.1 too as I have been waiting for a 15.2.1 for bug fixes, but they released 15.3 instead.
of course it is.
thanks. now i'm wondering why it hasn't been pestering me to upgrade. i just went and looked, and now it sees the upgrade possible. i must have told it later and promptly forgot about it
I switched from iStats to stats like 1 year ago. I found it more responsive (and free). I'm using Vetero for the weather functionality.
with macs being so powerful, I am now only monitoring 12 hour energy consumption in Activity Monitor
I needed something like stats back when RAM was an issue on my MacBook 2011 (I installed 16Gb even so 8 was the official max from Apple) and the n during the 2020ish years before my first M series to figure out why my fans started to act up. Now I also only need to figure out what eats Batterie.
I need it on apple silicon for the opposite reason, because there is basically no feedback from the computer if something is eating all then resources. Eg sometimes something eats my ram and it starts swapping and I do not even notice.
Exactly my situation too. Both for CPU (the MBA is fanless) and memory. You just have no idea otherwise, in many cases.
Looks nice. Any suggestions for a similar graphical tool for Linux?
Reminds of MenuMeters - really great at showing real-time metrics and various types of graphs with different refresh intervals.
https://member.ipmu.jp/yuji.tachikawa/MenuMetersElCapitan/
Aww yeah, I’ve been rocking menu meters for almost a decade now. I can’t believe people get by without a bandwidth meter at least, so helpful for so many reasons
Can it beat istat?
it phones home, make sure to disable its internet connection using Lulu or something.
Checking for updates is not the same as "phoning home".
It also comes with telemetry, but you can disable it.
For me Stats replaced MenuMeters, which has not been updated lately.
Menumeters still works for me on the latest MacOS (actually it's some fork of menumeters)
What does this have that menumeters hasn't?
I've just switched, mainly it works 100% while some menumeter sensors do not show up on the menu bar for me. The drop down menu is also much more informative and modern with charts.
Interesting to see MacOS users finally get an option like this. KDE Plasma has this for the past 5+ years, you can even create little custom reporting widgets with various system information and different chart designs.
This didn't just come out, this has been available on MacOS for years.
I love the way KDE handles system monitor widgets, especially nowadays. It's great for people that want to make graphs with desperate sensors like plotting your CPU temp against your GPU temp or your IO speed with your network speed.
The lack of a systray on MacOS is one of the reasons I really hate the interface. Stuff like this can partly make up for that.
How is a menu bar app not a substitute for the systray?
Because programs can not register an icon to minimize the apps to the menubar app while providing core functionality and info via a context menu and tooltips, at least AFAIK.
Spotify can do that, so apparently it's an option even though not very common.