osbeat

Your system, with a heartbeat.

A live terminal monitor for macOS with the Apple logo in the middle. The logo reacts to the system: CPU makes it breathe, memory fills it like liquid, and network traffic sends a shimmer across it.

Real terminal output, recorded in demo mode: the logo effects are scripted, the stats are live.

Install

macOS on Apple Silicon or Intel, in a truecolor terminal such as Ghostty, iTerm2 or Terminal. No sudo, no account.

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vladiclick/osbeat/main/install.sh | sh

The installer downloads the latest release for your Mac, checks its SHA-256, and puts osbeat in ~/.local/bin. Use --bin-dir PATH to choose another directory or --version v0.2.0 to pin a release.

From source, with Rust 1.95+:

cargo install --git https://github.com/vladiclick/osbeat --locked

or from a checkout: sh scripts/install_local.sh.

Then run:

osbeat

Use

Key	Action
Tab	Living canvas / detailed dashboard
c	Live customization panel
t	Cycle themes: default, Catppuccin, Tokyo Night, Gruvbox, Phosphor
e	Cycle effects: Aurora, Liquid, Spectrum, Original
g	Solid / ASCII / dot-matrix logo
a or Space	Pause / resume motion
m	Demo mode for the logo; stats stay real
s	Save preferences
d	Show osbeat's own CPU and memory
?	Help
q or Ctrl-C	Quit and restore the terminal

osbeat --demo --effect liquid             # show off the logo effects
osbeat --theme tokyonight --dashboard
osbeat --init-config                      # write a default config, never overwrites
osbeat --config ./preferences.toml

Preferences live in ~/.config/osbeat/config.toml (or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/osbeat/config.toml). The customization panel previews every change live and s saves it. See the example config. Files are validated strictly, so typos and out-of-range values are errors.

How the logo works

• CPU → breathing. Utilization sets the pulse speed.
• RAM → liquid. Used memory sets the fill height, with a moving waterline.
• Network → shimmer. Download rate sets the speed of a wave, on a log scale so both light browsing and fast downloads are visible.
• Values ease smoothly over time. Stats are sampled every 500 ms; the logo animates separately at 30 fps.

The Apple silhouette is a 128×128 coverage mask rendered with antialiased half-block cells (or braille dots). The engine only does color math on a mask, so any logo works: point logo in your config at a TOML asset with the same name, colors, art and optional mask fields as the bundled one.

The dashboard shows per-core CPU, load averages, RAM, swap, network graphs, disk space, battery and uptime. Missing readings stay blank, and nothing is estimated: there are no temperature or GPU readings yet.

Performance

Measured on an Apple M4, macOS 26.6.2, release build, 30 fps, 35 s per run. CPU is percent of one core.

Mode	CPU	Memory
Canvas, 110×32	0.97%	8.9 MiB
Canvas, 120×36	1.09%	9.7 MiB
Dashboard, 110×32	0.97%	9.0 MiB
Canvas + diagnostics, 160×48	1.26%	11.9 MiB

Animation frames only repaint logo cells that changed. The first frame appears in under 15 ms.

Development

cargo fmt --check
cargo clippy --all-targets -- -D warnings
cargo test                                   # 82 tests
python3 -m unittest tests/test_install.py   # installer and packaging
python3 scripts/terminal_check.py --measure 35

Releases: sh scripts/build_release.sh builds the Apple Silicon and Intel archives and SHA256SUMS into dist/; upload those to a GitHub release named after the version in Cargo.toml.

src/
  animation/   logo-independent color fields
  collectors/  500 ms CPU/network worker, 10 s disk/battery worker
  config/      strict TOML, atomic saves, themes
  logo/        logo assets → colored character masks
  ui/          canvas, dashboard, live customization
  runtime.rs   separate animation, collection and input clocks

Status

Works and is tested on macOS. Not done yet: process and event views, crash/network-drop reactions, temperatures, GPU and power draw, and a Homebrew formula.

Credits and license

MIT. The ASCII logo art comes from fastfetch (MIT, revision 2f68ce7f7467ddbaaf31519c1d41455781d48492); fastfetch is not run at runtime. The detailed Apple silhouette is from Simple Icons (CC0 1.0). Full notices are in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.