See what your Mac is doing — right from the menu bar.

Pulse puts your Mac's vital signs at the top of the screen: how busy the processor is, how much memory is in use, how hot it's running, fan speed, network and disk activity, battery health, and more. It's tiny, native, and free — no window to manage, no Dock icon, no account.

It's a macOS take on the popular GNOME extension Vitals — the same idea, rebuilt from scratch for the Mac.

• Pin what matters. Pick any metric and it shows live, right in the menu bar next to the clock.
• Click for the full picture. The dropdown lists every group — CPU, memory, temperature, and so on — each with a live summary.
• Stays out of the way. No Dock icon, no floating window. Quit from the dropdown whenever you like.

• CPU — how hard the processor is working, overall and per core, with a little live graph in the menu bar
• Memory — how much RAM is in use, plus swap
• Temperature — how hot the chip and its parts are running
• Fans — fan speed (hidden on fanless Macs like the MacBook Air)
• Network — upload and download speeds, plus totals
• Disk — free space and read/write speeds
• GPU — how busy the graphics are
• Power — how many watts the CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine are drawing
• Battery — charge, health, cycles, temperature, and time remaining

If your Mac doesn't have a particular sensor, Pulse simply hides that section — it never gets in the way.

brew install emgeorrk/tap/pulse
ln -sfn "$(brew --prefix)/opt/pulse/Pulse.app" /Applications/Pulse.app
open /Applications/Pulse.app

Homebrew builds Pulse on your own machine, so macOS opens it without any security warnings. The second line adds it to your Applications folder, and brew upgrade pulse keeps it up to date.

1. Download Pulse-<version>-arm64.zip from the Releases page and unzip it.

2. Move Pulse.app into your Applications folder.

3. Open Terminal, paste the two lines below, and press Return:

   xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Pulse.app
   open /Applications/Pulse.app

The downloaded app isn't signed by Apple, so macOS blocks it at first. The first line tells macOS the app is safe; the second one launches it.

This ready-made download is for Apple Silicon Macs (M1 and newer). On an older Intel Mac, use Homebrew or build it yourself.

Open Pulse's Settings and turn on Launch at login — it'll start automatically every time you sign in.

Everything is in the dropdown menu:

• Update speed — refresh every 1, 2, 3, or 5 seconds
• Temperature — °C or °F
• Data units — GB or GiB
• Menu bar graph — show or hide the little CPU sparkline
• Launch at login

Does it need my password or admin rights? No. Pulse reads everything from regular user space — it never asks for a password.

Will it slow my Mac down? No. It wakes up a few times a second, reads the sensors, and goes back to sleep. The footprint is tiny.

Intel Macs? Pulse runs, but the Intel sensor readings (temperature and fans) haven't been tested on real Intel hardware yet, so some of those numbers may be missing or off. Apple Silicon is fully supported.

Pulse is written in Go with CGO, reading Apple's IOKit, SMC, HID, and IOReport interfaces directly — no sudo, no powermetrics.

Build from source (needs macOS 12+, Xcode command line tools, and Go 1.26):

make run    # build the app, sign it, and launch it
make once   # print one metrics frame to the terminal (no UI)
make test   # run the tests

Architecture, conventions, and the Apple Silicon vs. Intel sensor paths are documented in CLAUDE.md.

Verified on Apple Silicon. Everything except the Intel-only paths has been tested there. If you confirm a feature on other hardware, a note in a PR is welcome.

Before opening a pull request:

make test   # unit tests
make lint   # golangci-lint (strict)
make vet    # go vet

MIT © 2026 Egor Merkushev.