● Covered by 1 source · 1 reportLow impact1 neutral
Siltop: A New Terminal System Monitor for Apple Silicon Macs
Key points
- Monitors Apple Silicon chip metrics (watts, clocks, temps) without sudo.
- Uses macOS APIs like SMC, IOReport, Mach, and sysctl for data.
- Consumes about 1.3% of one core, half of btop's usage.
- Features braille graphs, customizable themes, and process management.
Introducing Siltop for Apple Silicon
Siltop is a newly released system monitor designed specifically for Apple Silicon Macs. It operates within the terminal and provides detailed insights into the chip's performance, including real-time wattage, clock speeds, and temperatures for M1 through M5 chips. The tool distinguishes itself by not requiring root privileges (sudo) to access this hardware-level information.
Addressing Gaps in Existing Tools
The developer created Siltop to address limitations found in other popular monitoring tools on macOS. While btop offers a visually appealing interface, it lacks Apple Silicon-specific chip data. Tools like asitop and powermetrics provide chip details but necessitate sudo access. Siltop aims to combine the depth of chip monitoring with the user-friendliness and security of not requiring elevated permissions.
Technical Implementation and Performance
Siltop gathers its data directly from macOS system frameworks, utilizing the SMC for fans, temperatures, and system power, IOReport for CPU and GPU clocks and energy, and Mach/sysctl for CPU, memory, and process information. It avoids scraping or relying on powermetrics. The tool is written in Rust, resulting in a single native binary of approximately 3 MB. Performance measurements indicate it uses about 1.3% of one core at a 1-second interval, which is half the cost of btop and comparable to macmon on an M5 Pro chip.
User Interface and Features
The monitor features braille graphs that align on a shared time-linear clock, with zoom capabilities. It offers themes derived from the terminal's palette, including ten built-in options and btop theme import compatibility. Siltop provides two main display surfaces: 'Work' for detailed analysis and 'Glance' for a compact, always-on view. It also includes a process table with live filtering, sorting, tree view, app grouping, and a details card for threads, open files, and ports, alongside process control options like signaling and renicing.
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Primary sources
GitHub cmc_internal/api GitHub github/collect GitHub CLoaKY233/siltop GitHub _private/browser GitHub get-started/accessibility GitHub open-source/sponsorsReporting from
Siltop is a new terminal-based system monitoring tool for Apple Silicon Macs that provides detailed chip metrics like watts, clocks, and temperatures without requiring sudo. It aims to bridge the gap between existing tools by offering comprehensive data with a low resource footprint and a user-friendly interface.