See what your Mac is doing in the terminal

Fans ramp up mid-call. Activity Monitor works, but it is a heavy overlay when you already live in Terminal. Generic Linux monitors miss Mac energy and Apple Silicon context.

What bmtop is for

BetterMac bmtop is an open-source terminal monitor: sort processes by CPU, memory, or energy-related signals, then confirm before you quit anything destructive. On Apple Silicon it surfaces SoC telemetry the current release documents on the product page — useful next to build logs or an SSH session on a headless Mac mini.

What it is not

Estimated watts is an attribution model, not a lab wattmeter. Fan and sensor coverage depends on hardware. Memory numbers can disagree with Activity Monitor because macOS reports compressed and real memory differently; that is a measurement difference, not automatically a bug in either tool.

Try it

Install from the lines on the bmtop product page (Homebrew or GitHub Releases). Source is MIT on GitHub.