A zero-config system monitor for the macOS terminal.
machud is opinionated — that's the whole point. Where btop wins on deep configurability, machud wins on beautiful + zero-config: no settings, no config files, no layout knobs. The single curated wide-screen dashboard — Apple-Silicon-aware, following your macOS light/dark (or press t to override) — is the product. Want to tune everything yourself? Use btop. machud is the considered default that looks right out of the box and never asks for your password.
Requires macOS and Node ≥ 22.18. No install, no config, no password:
npx machud@latestUsing Vite+? Try it with:
vpx machud@latest
pnpm install
pnpm build # bundle to dist/machud.mjs
pnpm start # run the live dashboard (needs a real TTY)Other entry points:
pnpm dev # dev mode with HMR
node dist/machud.mjs --once # render ONE real-data frame to stdout and exit--once needs no TTY — it prints a single frame with live readings and doubles as a pipe-friendly snapshot.
- Zero-sudo first. Every reading comes from unprivileged commands (
sysctl,vm_stat,ioreg,pmset,netstat,df,ps) plus Node'sos. Metrics that would needsudo— precise per-cluster frequency, GPU watts, fan RPM, die temperatures — are left out rather than shown as dead rows. They never block startup, and machud never asks for your password. - Never crash, just degrade. Each collector returns safe nulls on failure, and any throwing collector is swapped for its empty default. A missing metric is a dash, not a stack trace.
- Apple-Silicon-aware. P/E-core clusters, unified-memory pressure, and live battery wattage are first-class — with graceful single-cluster fallback on Intel.
machud is opinionated by design. Bug reports are welcome; feature PRs opened without a prior, agreed-upon issue are closed directly, and theming / feature / aesthetic changes are generally not accepted. See CONTRIBUTING.md.
machud was inspired by Stats by @exelban — its idea, brought to the terminal.