siltop

siltop [options]siltop command [arguments]

siltop is a terminal system monitor for Apple Silicon Macs (M1 through M5). It shows CPU (per cluster and per core), GPU, memory and pressure, power, temperatures, fans, network, disk, and processes. A reading the Mac does not publish is left out or shown as —, never as a made-up zero. Fanless machines have no fan panel, and desktops have no battery.The default Work surface is graphs beside a process table. Glance is graphs only, for a small window. CPU usage on the main graph is frequency-weighted: a core that is busy at half its top clock counts as half busy, so the figure can read lower than Activity Monitor. Power rails that publish in batches are held and marked ≈ with their age instead of dropping to zero.With no command, siltop opens the dashboard. Headless modes print JSON, a verdict, a status line, or Prometheus metrics and do not need a full-screen UI. The background agent runs the same alerts at login without a dashboard. History is kept for 30 days and can be reported or exported after the dashboard is closed.Numbers come from macOS APIs a normal user may call: the SMC for fans, temperatures, and system power; IOReport for clocks and energy; IOHID for sensors; Mach and sysctl for CPU, memory, and processes. It does not call ps or powermetrics, and it does not require sudo.

-i, --interval TIME

Sampling interval, from 100 ms to 60 s. A bare number or a ms suffix is milliseconds (250, 250ms). A s suffix is seconds (1s, 1.5s).

Colour theme. auto (the default) builds one from the terminal palette. Built-ins include billabong, paper, okabe, terminal, catppuccin-mocha, tokyo-night, nord, kanagawa, and gruvbox-dark. siltop theme list prints the full set.

Start on work or glance.

Do not capture the mouse.

Read preferences from PATH instead of the default config file.

Play a canned 60-second session instead of sampling this Mac. Also accepted by scripting modes, bench, and fleet, so a script can be tried without hardware.

Print one JSON sample and exit. Unmeasured values are null, not 0. With report or bench, print that report as one JSON object instead.

Print one JSON sample per interval as NDJSON.

Stop --json-stream after N samples.

How many processes to include in JSON output. Default is 10.

Print the verdict (All normal, Busy: …, Hot: …) and the evidence behind it.

Print the effective preferences, after -i, --surface, and --theme, and exit.

Print help. siltop help COMMAND, or COMMAND --help, prints one command.

Print the version. --verbose adds the build and the config and state paths. --json prints the same facts as JSON.

Preferences live in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/siltop/config.toml (default ~/.config/siltop/config.toml). The file is written only when a setting changes. User themes are .toml files in themes/ beside it.State lives in $XDG_STATE_HOME/siltop/ (default ~/.local/state/siltop/): history/ (up to 30 days), bench.ndjson, updates.toml, agent.json and agent.log when the agent runs, and crash-<time>.txt if the process panics. agent install adds ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.siltop.agent.plist and uninstall removes it.SILTOP_THEME

Theme name. Overrides the config file.

siltop, htop, or btop.

truecolor, 256, 16, or none.

unicode, nerd, or none.

Translucent window: on, off, auto, or an opacity such as 0.8.

Skip the first-run screens.

Any value other than 0 or false turns update checks off.

Any non-empty value: attributes only, unless a theme is named. line --style ansi then prints plain text.

doctor

Print the model, chip, SMC keys, temperature sensors, which readings work without root, and what siltop itself costs. Useful in a bug report.

List every built-in, pack, and user theme.

Convert a btop .theme file into themes/ next to the config.

Energy by app, peak power and temperatures, and time spent hot, from saved history. week is 7 days and month is 30. --json prints one JSON object. Works with the dashboard closed.

Alerts in the background as a per-user LaunchAgent (no sudo). install starts it at login. run is the foreground mode launchd uses. The default action is status.

Print one status line and exit, for tmux, SketchyBar, or Starship. The template may use {cpu}, {gpu}, {mem}, {power}, {temp}, {swap}, {thermal}, {verdict}, and {alerts}. A reading this Mac cannot measure is omitted. --style is plain, ansi, or tmux.

Record this Mac to a .ptrace file (default siltop-<time>.ptrace) until SPAN (90s, 10m, 2h) elapses or Ctrl-C. A cut-short file still replays up to its last whole frame.

Play a .ptrace in the dashboard. p pauses, + and - change speed, and the arrow keys scrub.

Sustained CPU test. Spins one busy thread per logical core (half the cores with --light), then reports early versus sustained clocks, peak temperature, and whether the chip throttled. Default duration is 60 s. A run that is stopped early is incomplete unless throttling was already seen. Compared with the last full run of the same kind on the same chip. Stops if any temperature reaches 105 °C.

Serve Prometheus metrics. GET /metrics only. Listens on 127.0.0.1:9101 unless --addr names another address.

This Mac beside other Macs, one card per host. Each remote is ssh -o BatchMode=yes -- HOST siltop --json-stream --procs 3, so the remote needs siltop on PATH and key-based login. --demo fills the grid without ssh.

Print saved history as CSV. WHEN is a UTC date (2026-09-23) or a span ago (24h, 7d). --csv is required.

Show the first-run screens again.

Look up a newer GitHub release and say how to install it. A Homebrew or cargo install copy is not replaced in place. --yes installs a release download you can write. --check exits 10 when an update exists. --rollback restores siltop.old.

Print a prefilled GitHub issue link (version, chip, macOS build, install method). --bug uses the bug-report form. --copy puts siltop doctor output on the clipboard and does not open a browser.

Delete config, state, and history. --yes skips the typed confirmation.

Print a completion script for zsh, bash, or fish.

Print the manual page in roff. siltop man | mandoc -a displays it.

q

Quit. Inside an overlay, q closes the overlay instead.

Main menu.

Searchable list of every key.

Settings. Changes are written back to the config file and existing comments are kept.

Switch between Work and Glance.

Next theme.

Expand or collapse the focused panel.

Pause. Sampling stops as well.

Sample slower or faster.

Presets: silicon, ml, laptop, sre, and ricer. They change which panels show and how the process table sorts.

Timeline of saved history on one time axis.

Zen mode: graphs only.

Filter the process table. t toggles the tree, a groups helpers under their app, x sends SIGTERM, K sends SIGKILL, and X opens the signal picker. A kill is refused if the pid was reused.

Apple Silicon macOS only. Intel Macs and Linux can compile the binary, but the collectors are stubs and sample nothing.macOS hides CPU, memory, and energy for other users' processes. Those rows keep their name and pid and show — for the rest. Their CPU is still counted in the machine total. Run with sudo only if those per-process numbers are required.The dashboard needs a terminal. A pipe or cron job should use --json, --json-stream, or --diagnose.A browser-downloaded binary is quarantined because the release is not notarized. Clear it with xattr -d com.apple.quarantine siltop, or install with curl or Homebrew, which are not quarantined. Graphs use Braille; the font needs those characters (SF Mono, Menlo, JetBrains Mono, Iosevka, and Nerd Fonts do).Update checks, when opted in, run /usr/bin/curl at most once a day against the GitHub releases API and send only siltop/version as the User-Agent. serve is the only listener, on loopback unless --addr says otherwise. fleet reaches other Macs only through ssh.Exit status 0 is success, 1 is a runtime error, 2 is a usage error or a dashboard with no terminal, and 10 means update --check found a newer release.

siltop is written in Rust by Lay Sheth (2026). It is licensed under MIT or Apache-2.0, at your option.

btop(1), htop(1), macmon(1), top(1), nvtop(1)

Source code · Documentation