System monitor

Hegemon

There are many command-line system monitor tools, and we've looked at a fair number in these pages, but there's always room for another monitor that attempts to do something differently. Hegemon succeeds, mostly, because it presents only the information we really care about in a way that's useful. That information is how much of your CPU capacity is being used (broken down into cores, if required), how hot your system is running, and how well your fan or cooling is responding to this load. It presents this information as a scrolling and colorful histogram that can be expanded or contracted with a simple press of the space bar. As system load increases, you can see exactly which cores are carrying the burden, along with how it's heating up your system. The fan speed will typically ramp up to compensate, creating a scrolling chart of your system load and on-going performance.

The folding and unfolding of each element is a quick and easy way to limit the details you see, as well as to get more information when you need it. To Hegemon, each of these sources is a data stream, effectively making the application modular, and further data streams can potentially be plugged into the same system. The excellent documentation covers the details and also promises incoming network, disk I/O, and GPU usage streams to augment the already busy display. The application itself is written in Rust and is installed via Cargo, which makes it a little more install-resource-heavy than the typical command-driven monitor. However, this means writing a new data stream could be a perfect point of entry for someone's nascent Rust skills and a great way of adding to an already fully functional and useful tool.

Project Website

https://github.com/p-e-w/hegemon

We need a new category for command-line tools like Hegemon that would look amazing in hacker-related films.

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