mbtop

mbtop is a tiny, fast system monitor made for small terminal panes. It shows the signals that are useful at a glance without trying to become another process manager:

• CPU usage with a short history sparkline
• memory and root-disk usage
• 1, 5, and 15 minute load averages
• aggregate network receive/transmit rate
• uptime and CPU count

The UI inherits the terminal's default foreground and background for all text. Its charts use only semantic ANSI palette colors, so it stays at home in a custom terminal theme. The compact card needs at least 36×8; if a pane shrinks below that, mbtop centers a resize hint until there is room again.

The renderer uses Ratatui primitives for the CPU sparkline, memory/disk gauges, rounded borders, and resize-aware layout. See the design research notes for the comparison with btop's graph and theme choices.

Use --icon for compact glyph labels when the pane is especially narrow:

mbtop --icon

Use --borderless when the surrounding terminal layout already provides a frame:

mbtop --borderless

Charts use a terminal-palette gradient from cyan through green and yellow to red as values rise.

Install

With Rust installed:

cargo install --path .

With Homebrew on macOS:

brew install matheuseabra/tap/mbtop

Or run it from a checkout:

cargo run --release

Usage

mbtop 0.1.7 — tiny system monitor for terminal dashboard panes

Usage: mbtop [OPTIONS]

Options:
  -d, --disk <PATH>       Disk mount or path to report (default: /)
  -i, --interval <MS>     Refresh interval in milliseconds (default: 1000)
      --icon              Use compact Unicode glyphs instead of text labels
      --borderless        Omit the dashboard's outer border
  -h, --help              Show this help
  -V, --version           Show version

Keys: q / Esc / Ctrl-C to quit

It is intentionally friendly to tmux and other dashboard layouts:

mbtop --interval 2000

Demo

The checked-in demo is generated with VHS:

cargo build --release --locked
vhs docs/mbtop.tape

Development

cargo fmt --check
cargo test
cargo clippy --all-targets --all-features -- -D warnings

License

MIT. See LICENSE.

Please read CONTRIBUTING.md before opening a pull request, and use the private process in SECURITY.md for vulnerability reports.