pingx

A full-screen terminal ping monitor with live RTT history, rolling loss stats, and WAN failover detection.

Standard ping gives you a wall of scrolling numbers. pingx replaces that with a live four-panel dashboard: a braille sparkline that plots RTT over time, rolling packet loss windows, and automatic detection of gateway changes — useful when your network runs dual-WAN or has a failover setup.

Features

• Auto-reconnect — detects network down after 5 consecutive timeouts, retries in the background, resumes automatically on recovery
• WAN failover detection — polls the default route every 3 seconds; announces gateway changes as they happen
• Braille sparkline — rolling RTT history rendered with Unicode braille characters; auto-scales Y-axis to the observed range so variation is always visible
• Live RTT stats — current / average / min / max, updated every ping
• Rolling loss windows — packet loss over the last 5 minutes and last 1 hour, plus all-time total
• Failover event log — last 2 WAN events with timestamps and recovery durations
• Colour themes — 6 named palettes that restyle the entire interface
• No root required — uses unprivileged ICMP (SOCK_DGRAM) on macOS; see Linux notes below

Install

Homebrew (macOS — recommended):

brew install tom-xyz/tap/pingx

pipx (any platform — recommended for CLI tools):

pipx install pingx

pip:

pip install pingx

From source:

git clone https://github.com/Tom-xyz/pingx.git
cd pingx
pip install -e .

Requirements

• macOS or Linux (see Platform support)
• Python 3.10+
• rich (installed automatically)

Usage

pingx [OPTIONS] host

pingx 9.9.9.9
pingx google.com
pingx 192.168.1.1          # ping your router
pingx -c 100 8.8.8.8       # stop after 100 pings
pingx -i 1 -W 2 8.8.8.8   # 1-second interval, 2-second timeout
pingx --color blue 9.9.9.9 # blue theme

Press Ctrl-C to exit. A summary (packets transmitted/received, loss %, min/avg/max/stddev RTT) is printed on exit.

Options

Flag	Long	Default	Description
-c N	--count	unlimited	Stop after N pings
-i S	--interval	0.2	Ping interval in seconds
-s B	--size	56	ICMP payload size in bytes
-t N	--ttl	64	IP Time To Live
-W S	--timeout	1.5	Receive timeout per ping
	--color THEME	green	Colour theme (see below)
	--version		Print version and exit

Colour themes

--color green (default) --color blue --color cyan --color amber --color red --color purple

Each theme changes the entire interface palette — borders, logo gradient, sparkline health bands, stats colouring, and status indicators.

Layout

┌────────────────────────────────┬───────────────────────────┐
│  PINGX logo + connection info  │  Live RTT & packet stats  │  (top, 2:5 ratio)
├────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────────┤
│  Latency History               │  WAN & Events             │  (bottom, 3:2 ratio)
│  (braille sparkline, Y=RTT)    │  (route + failover log)   │
└────────────────────────────────┴───────────────────────────┘

The layout reflows on terminal resize. The latency history panel intentionally dominates — it's the primary visual.

Sparkline

The latency history chart uses Unicode braille characters as a 2×4-pixel canvas per character, giving high-density RTT visualization without any dependencies beyond rich.

• Y-axis auto-scales to the observed RTT range — stable networks show their micro-variation instead of a flat line
• Right edge = newest ping (bold); scrolls left as data arrives
• Dim red ⣀ dots fill the chart before data arrives
• True timeouts render as natural gaps (empty braille space)
• Colour bands are intentionally wide (< 80ms = ok, not < 20ms) so normal home-network variation never flips colour

Platform support

macOS works out of the box. pingx uses socket.SOCK_DGRAM with IPPROTO_ICMP, which macOS grants without elevated privileges.

Linux requires unprivileged ICMP to be enabled. If you see a permission error, run once as root:

sudo sysctl -w net.ipv4.ping_group_range="0 65535"

To make it permanent, add to /etc/sysctl.conf:

net.ipv4.ping_group_range = 0 65535

Or simply run sudo pingx ....

Windows is not supported. Use WSL2.

Running tests

pip install pytest
python3 -m pytest tests/

License

MIT — see LICENSE