Bill Clementson's Blog

Mac OS X GeekTool

Monday, March 19, 2007

If you read my posts for the lisp content or you don't have a Mac, you'll probably want to stop reading this post now. However, if you're a Mac user and you haven't discovered GeekTool yet, you might be interested in this one. ;-)

I recently discovered GeekTool, a utility that lets you display the text output (you can also display graphics) of different commands on your desktop. I've found this really useful for displaying a variety of different things that tell me a bit more about what's happening on my machine. There's a great Lifehacker introduction to GeekTools that explains more about what GeekTools is and how to set it up, so I won't go over that here. Suffice to say that GeekTools is one of those utilities that quickly becomes addictive. For example, I normally have a clean desktop on my Mac (no icons, hidden dock):



However, when I enable GeekTool, I get the following on my desktop (click on the image for a higher resolution image):



This provides me with a "snapshot" of what's happening on my machine. Basically, my GeekTools setup is:

1. In the upper-left-hand part of the screen, I'm displaying a line showing the uptime and memory summary (refreshed every 60 seconds). This is produced with the following:

   uptime | awk '{printf "Uptime: " $3 " " $4 " " $5 " " }'; top -l 1 |
   awk '/PhysMem/ {printf "RAM : " $8 ", " }' ; top -l 2 | awk '/CPU
   usage/ && NR > 5 {print $6, $7=":", $8, $9="user", $10, $11="sys",
   $12, $13}'

2. Directly under #1, I display the disk usage summary (refreshed every 60 seconds). This is produced with the following:

   df -h | grep disk0s3 | awk '{print "Macintosh HD:", $2, "total,", $3, "used,", $4, "remaining"}'

3. Under that is a list of the last 60 processes sorted in descending order by process id (refreshed every 10 seconds). This is produced with the following:

   top -n 60 -l 2 | tail -61

4. Under that is my external IP address (refreshed every 300 seconds). This is produced with the following:

   echo External IP: `curl -s http://checkip.dyndns.org/ | sed 's/[a-zA-Z<>/ :]//g'`

5. At the top-middle of the screen is a calendar (with the current date in parenthesis and a summary of 4 different iCal calendars (refreshed every 60 seconds). The Calendar was produced with a modified version of this script and the iCal output was produced with a modified version of this script.
6. At the bottom-middle of the screen is the latest output to the system.log file (refreshed every 10 seconds). This is produced with the following:

   tail /private/var/log/system.log

7. At the right of the screen is a summary of the processes using the most CPU, processes using the most CPU time, and processes using the most memory (refreshed every 60 seconds). This is produced with this script.