dshb

An OS X system monitor in Swift, inspired by top & htop. Displays live readings of system CPU & memory usage, machine temperature sensors, fan speeds, battery information and other miscellaneous system statistics. The ncurses based TUI (text-based user interface) uses color coating to imply status and is fully resizable. Stats are updated at one second intervals while still maintaining low overhead (the observer effect is inescapable in this case sadly).

Why?

• Exploration of Swift. In particular, systems programming and interfacing with low-level C APIs
• Improved top
• Improved htop (for OS X). htop was originally written for Linux. It was forked at some point and ported over to OS X. However, the port is now using what is a 5 year old fork. Work is being done to address this

Of course, the last two are far from being true! :) dshb is still early in development.

Requirements

• Xcode 6.3
• OS X 10.9+
  • This is due to Swift

Clone

Make sure to use the recursive option on clone to auto init all submodules.

git clone --recursive https://github.com/beltex/dshb

Incase you have already cloned the repository.

# Inside the project directory
git submodule update --init --recursive

Build

Besides building from inside of Xcode, you can compile dshb from the command line like so

make build

The resulting binary will be found inside the bin/ directory. If you copy it to either /usr/bin/ (requires sudo) or /usr/local/bin/ (assuming it's in your PATH - Homebrew would have done this for you), you can then run dshb from anywhere.

Stack

• ncurses
  • For drawing to the terminal (tested with version 5.4 - default on OS X)
• SystemKit
  • For almost all statistics
• SMCKit
  • For temperature & fan statistics
• CommandLine
  • For the CLI
• ronn
  • For generating the manual page

All Git submodules are built part of the project as simply source files, not frameworks (which are essentially dynamic libraries). This is because currently, the Swift runtime dynamic libraries must be packaged with the application in question. In the case of dshb, a single binary is generated which has the runtime statically linked. Thus, frameworks, which expect to find the libraries inside the application bundle (.app), cannot "see" them.

For more see:

• SwiftInFlux/Runtime Dynamic Libraries
• SwiftInFlux/Static Libraries

References

• top
• NCURSES Programming HOWTO
• Programmer's Guide to ncurses
• Writing Programs with NCURSES

License

This project is under the MIT License.

P.S.

Working on this always brought a smile to my face. I hope it brings a smile to yours too. Enjoy :)