hkmon(1)

NAME

hkmon - a featureful and lightweight CLI system monitor

SYNOPSIS

hkmon [NET [interface]] [CPU] [TEMP] [IO] [RAM]
Use “NET8” to display in bytes (B) instead of bits (b)

DESCRIPTION

hkmon is a command line system monitor. When several options are combined, the panel vertical real estate required will grow. In case the panel is not wide enough, the optional LINE option allows switching into a fully horizontal layout.

The network interface shown in the panel is automatically selected (the most active interface in the last interval, except for the loopback). If your system has several active interfaces and you prefer a concrete one, simply add its name (eth0, ppp0, etc) to the command line (NET could be omitted). The tooltip shows all the network interfaces with at least one byte transferred, and a mark signaling which one is being reported in the panel. By default the speed is shown in bits per second (use NET8 to select bytes).

Likewise, only physical disks with data transferred since boot are reported. If a device (network or disk) is moving a single byte of data, the related △ or ▽ arrow will turn dark (meanwhile, the IO or bandwidth value reported may be shown as 0 under too little data transferred). The tooltip shows a CPU usage resume (all cores) and a brief breakdown by core. Values within parentheses are the accumulated usage since boot. The speed summary displayed at the top is weighted by real usage (thus it can run from a few MHz all the way to as many GHz as the number of cores available multiplied by their max clock).

If a virtual machine is running, guest or guest nice CPU values will be reported showing its expenditure (on the other hand, if this monitor's computer runs inside a virtual machine, a steal value could be reported).

The temperature shown in the panel area is the highest read among all cores and sockets (if there are several cores or sockets, the tooltip groups them reporting the max/min/avg instead).

The command line arguments mostly select the tooltip verbosity. If the CPU is selected, either the temperature or the RAM will also appear in the panel at its side (the one first listed in the command line will be selected).

The application writes temporary data in shared memory (SSD friendly) usually in /run/user/ to store its previous state (since it is periodically executed). The binary will be cached by Linux, thus there is little performance penalty on this setup. The test machine was at 0.60% CPU while idle with no monitor, 0.86% CPU with the monitor running, and 1.17% CPU with the tooltip open (due to Xorg activity, because the monitor always generates the tooltip, even while hidden)

AUTHORS
Ciriaco Garcia de Celis.