9top

9top is a lightweight, full-screen thermal and system monitor for Apple Silicon Macs. It is a single pure-C executable with no third-party runtime dependencies, helper processes, sudo requirement, analytics, or network calls.

Features

• CPU, GPU, and battery temperatures
• CPU and GPU utilization
• Memory, swap, and system load
• Semantic normal/elevated/high colors
• Responsive full and compact terminal layouts
• Event-driven rendering and a two-second default sample interval
• Clean terminal restoration after q, Ctrl-C, SIGTERM, or SIGHUP

Requirements

• Apple Silicon Mac
• macOS 14 or newer

Install

Download and verify the binary from the latest GitHub release:

curl -fLO https://github.com/syncroot/9top/releases/latest/download/9top-arm64
curl -fLO https://github.com/syncroot/9top/releases/latest/download/SHA256SUMS
shasum -a 256 -c SHA256SUMS
mkdir -p ~/.local/bin
install -m 755 9top-arm64 ~/.local/bin/9top

Ensure ~/.local/bin is in PATH, then run:

9top

Controls

Key	Action
q or Ctrl-C	Quit
p or Space	Pause or resume

Use a custom sampling interval of at least one second:

9top --interval 3

Disable colors using the standard NO_COLOR variable:

NO_COLOR=1 9top

Build from source

Xcode Command Line Tools are required:

make test
make release

The binary is generated at build/9top. Build artifacts are ignored and can be removed with make clean.

Resource profile

9top uses event-driven rendering, retains no metric history, and launches no helper processes. Resource usage varies by hardware and macOS version; measured figures for each release are published in its release notes.

Private API notice

Apple does not publish a supported API for CPU and GPU die temperatures. 9top reads them through the AppleSMC user-client interface and reads GPU utilization from the IOKit accelerator registry. Major macOS or hardware changes may require maintenance.

Privacy

All metrics remain on the Mac. 9top does not connect to the network, write monitoring data to disk, or collect analytics.

See SECURITY.md for vulnerability reporting and security boundaries. See THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md for upstream attribution.

License

MIT © 2026 Mohammed