tinymeter

a tiny xfce panel meter for network speed, ram, and cpu usage.

it sits in your panel, updates once a second, and tries very hard not to become a whole system monitoring app.

↓ 79K ↑ 25K  RAM 46%  CPU 21%

why i built it

i use stats on my mac and wanted the same kind of tiny always-visible meter on my linux setup, without installing a heavier monitor or running a daemon.

xfce already has genmon, which can render command output in the panel. so tinymeter is just a tiny c program that reads /proc + /sys, prints genmon markup, and exits.

boring on purpose.

what it does

• shows download and upload speed
• shows ram usage
• shows cpu usage
• smooths network and cpu numbers so the text does not jump around constantly
• auto-detects your default network interface
• supports xfce genmon markup out of the box

install

make
make check
make install

then point xfce genmon at:

~/.local/bin/tinymeter

you can also pass an interface manually:

~/.local/bin/tinymeter wlp2s0

without an argument, tinymeter tries the default-route interface first and falls back to the first non-loopback interface.

xfce genmon setup

install the xfce generic monitor panel plugin and set the command to:

~/.local/bin/tinymeter

set the period to 1000 ms.

if you already have a genmon plugin, this helper installs tinymeter and points the first genmon plugin at it:

scripts/install-xfce-genmon.sh

to target a specific genmon plugin id:

TINYMETER_XFCE_PLUGIN_ID=11 scripts/install-xfce-genmon.sh

style

the style file lives at:

~/.config/tinymeter/style

supported values:

arrows-bold
compact-words

notes

• network rates are smoothed with an exponential moving average
• cpu is calculated from /proc/stat deltas
• ram uses MemAvailable from /proc/meminfo
• state is stored under $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/tinymeter or /tmp/tinymeter
• no daemon, no tray icon, no graphs, no dashboard