vitals

A terminal system monitor built for a tiling window manager: it lives in one tile, reads at a glance, and costs almost nothing to leave running. It reports the things that explain an Apple Silicon machine — cluster split, memory pressure, die temperature, real tunnel state.

htop is a process list that grew some meters. On an Apple Silicon laptop the numbers that explain what the machine is doing are somewhere else, so vitals reports those instead.

how it works

Four panels, no process table, no fabricated values.

• E-cores and P-cores are not interchangeable. A load average of 4 means something different depending on which cluster is busy, so the clusters are separated.
• Memory pressure is not memory used. 79% used with a 2.35x compression ratio and normal pressure is a healthy machine. vitals shows the Activity Monitor breakdown, the ratio, and the real pressure level.
• A fanless Mac throttles instead of spinning up. There is no fan RPM to watch, so die temperature is the performance story.
• A VPN is either carrying your traffic or it is not. macOS always has idle utun devices; vitals distinguishes “a tunnel exists” from “your traffic goes through it”.

status

Working and in daily use. Where a real value is unavailable it is left blank rather than rendered as zero.