astop 0.1.1

Terminal-based Apple Silicon system monitor

astop

Terminal-based system monitor for Apple Silicon Macs
Like btop, but built for M-series chips.

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Why astop?

Existing Apple Silicon monitors (asitop, macmon, mxtop) hardcode chip names and cluster layouts, causing crashes on newer chips. astop discovers your SoC topology at runtime via sysctl — no hardcoded chip tables, no breakage on M4/M5/future chips.

Feature	astop	asitop	mxtop
Works on all M-series	Yes	Partial	No
Dynamic SoC discovery	Yes	No	No
GPU/ANE monitoring	Yes	Yes	Yes
Per-core CPU bars	Yes	No	No
Braille waveform graphs	Yes	No	No
No sudo required	Yes (degraded)	No	No

Install

pip install astop

Requires Python 3.11+ and macOS (Apple Silicon).

Usage

astop              # basic mode — CPU, memory, disk, network, processes
sudo astop         # enhanced mode — adds GPU, ANE, power, thermals
astop --no-sudo    # force basic mode even with sudo available
astop --refresh 2  # custom refresh interval (default: 1s)

Panels

Panel	Basic Mode	Sudo Mode
CPU — per-core bars + braille graph	Yes	Yes
GPU — utilization, frequency, power	—	Yes
ANE — Neural Engine utilization	—	Yes
Memory — usage, active, wired, compressed	Yes	Yes
Network / Disk — I/O rates + graph	Yes	Yes
Battery — charge, watts, time remaining	Yes	Yes + power breakdown
Processes — sortable top-N table	Yes	Yes

Keybindings

Key	Action
q	Quit
p	Pause / Resume
r	Force refresh
s	Cycle process sort (CPU / Mem / PID / Name)
v	Reverse sort order

How it works

astop uses hw.nperflevels and hw.perflevel{i}.* sysctl keys to dynamically discover CPU cluster topology at startup — no chip name lookup tables. GPU, ANE, and power data come from powermetrics (requires sudo). Everything else uses psutil.

Data collection runs in parallel via asyncio + thread executors, so the TUI never blocks.

License

MIT