SysWatch

System diagnostics in your terminal.

Live system activity in syswatch --dense.

Monitor CPU, memory, disks, processes, GPU, power and network activity on macOS and Linux. Scrub recent history, record sessions, and investigate spikes with heuristic anomaly cards. SysWatch is read-only and runs without sudo; available measurements depend on your platform and permissions.

Install

brew install syswatch                 # macOS / Linux
nix-shell -p syswatch                 # NixOS / Nix
paru -S syswatch                      # Arch (AUR)
cargo install syswatch                # build from source with Rust

Prebuilt binaries are available for macOS and Linux (x86_64 and aarch64), with static Linux builds and an armv5te build for older NAS hardware. Build from source.

Run

syswatch                       # twelve tabs, default 1 Hz refresh
syswatch --lite                # one 80×24 screen
syswatch --dense               # all main subsystems, designed for 130×44
syswatch --tab procs           # start on Processes

1–9, 0, - and + switch tabs. V cycles views, ? shows help, q quits. Use ← / → to scrub recent history and End to return live.

Every keybinding · Full-view demo

The tabs

Key	Tab	Shows
1	Overview	Activity across subsystems
2	CPU	CPU usage, load and per-core activity
3	Memory	Memory use, swap and pressure
4	Disks	Disk read/write activity
5	Filesystems	Capacity, inode use and mounts
6	Procs	Processes, resource use, sorting and filtering
7	GPU	Utilisation and memory, where available
8	Power	Battery and available power measurements
9	Services	systemd or launchd services
0	Net	Network traffic
-	Timeline	Session events and history scrubbing
+	Insights	Anomalies and suggested tabs to investigate

Views

View	Size	For
Full	Tabbed	Exploring individual subsystems
Lite (--lite)	80×24	SSH sessions and small terminals
Dense (--dense)	Designed for 130×44	CPU, memory, network, cores, disk and processes together

In Dense, 1–6 zoom a panel and Esc restores the grid. View details · Lite demo

Record and report

Press R to record an interactive session or S to save a snapshot.

syswatch --record --keep 24h          # foreground recording without a TUI
syswatch --replay session.swr         # replay a recording
syswatch snapshot --json             # one live sample
syswatch why                         # sample for 30s, explain detected anomalies
syswatch diff before.swr after.swr   # compare recordings

Live scrubbing holds 120 samples (two minutes at the default refresh rate). Record longer sessions to disk. Headless recording rotates files and prunes old chunks according to --keep; it runs until stopped. Recording and report details.

Docs

Reference	Controls, views, recording and reports
Platform support	Sensors, permissions, NVIDIA support and ZFS
Architecture	Collectors, history, rendering and refresh model
Security	Security policy

Related

NetWatch covers network diagnostics; DiskWatch covers disk activity. They share the terminal layout and palette.

Thanks

Community packagers maintain the Nix and Arch packages. Repology tracks package versions. File packaging issues with the packagers and SysWatch bugs here.

License

MIT