macmon – Mac Monitor

A sudoless performance monitoring CLI tool for Apple Silicon processors.

Motivation

Apple Silicon processors don’t provide an easy way to view live power consumption. I was interested in this data while testing local LLM models. asitop is a nice and simple TUI for quickly checking current metrics, but it reads data from powermetrics and requires root privileges. macmon uses a private macOS API to gather similar metrics (essentially the same as powermetrics), but runs without sudo. 🎉

🌟 Features

• 🚫 Runs without sudo
• ⚡ Real-time CPU / GPU / ANE power usage
• 📊 CPU utilization per cluster
• 💾 RAM / Swap usage
• 📈 Historical charts with average and max values
• 🌡️ Average CPU / GPU temperature
• 🎨 Switchable color themes (6 variants)
• 🪟 Can be displayed in a small window
• 🦀 Written in Rust

📥 Installation

• Install macmon using brew:

brew install macmon

• Install macmon using MacPorts:

sudo port install macmon

• Install macmon using Cargo:

cargo install macmon

• Install macmon using Nix:

nix-env -i macmon

🚀 Usage

Usage: macmon [OPTIONS] [COMMAND]

Commands:
pipe   Output metrics in JSON format
debug  Print debug information
help   Print this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)

Options:
-i, --interval <INTERVAL>  Update interval in milliseconds [default: 1000]
-h, --help                 Print help
-V, --version              Print version

Controls:
c - change color
v - switch charts view: gauge / sparkline
q - quit

🚰 Piping

You can use the pipe subcommand to output metrics in JSON format, which makes it suitable for piping into other tools or scripts. For example:

macmon pipe | jq

This command runs macmon in "pipe" mode and sends the output to jq for pretty-printing.

You can also specify the number of samples to collect using the -s or --samples parameter (default: 0, which runs indefinitely), and set the update interval in milliseconds using the -i or --interval parameter (default: 1000 ms). For example:

macmon pipe -s 10 -i 500 | jq

This will collect 10 samples with an update interval of 500 milliseconds.

Output

📦 Build from Source

Install Rust toolchain 1.

Clone the repo:

git clone https://github.com/vladkens/macmon.git && cd macmon

1. Build and run:

cargo run -r

🤝 Contributing

We love contributions! Whether you have ideas, suggestions, or bug reports, feel free to open an issue or submit a pull request. Your input is essential to helping us improve macmon. 💪

📝 License

macmon is distributed under the MIT License. For more details, check out the LICENSE file.

🔍 See also

• tlkh/asitop – The original tool. Written in Python, requires sudo.
• dehydratedpotato/socpowerbud – Written in Objective-C, sudoless, no TUI.
• op06072/NeoAsitop – Written in Swift, sudoless.
• graelo/pumas – Written in Rust, requires sudo.
• context-labs/mactop – Written in Go, requires sudo.

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P.S. One more thing... Monitoring your Mac’s performance with macmon is like having a personal trainer for your processor — keeping those cores in shape! 💪