mem-cpu-stats

mem-cpu-stats is a Bash script that prints a brief summary of memory and CPU usage at regular intervals. It works great in the tmux status bar. Here's a sample output:

1.6G ▂   0.7% ▁
1.6G ▂   0.7% ▁
1.6G ▂   1.7% ▁
1.6G ▂   4.7% ▁
1.6G ▂   0.7% ▁

Usage

mem-cpu-stats is just a Bash script, so as long as it's executable, you can just run it with /path/to/mem-cpu-stats.

The following options are supported:

    -c | --colors STYLE        Colorize the bars in STYLE. Currently the only
                               supported style is tmux. Default none.
    -i | --interval INTERVAL   Print output every INTERVAL seconds. INTERVAL
                               must be an integer greater than 0. Default 5.
    -m | --mem-width WIDTH     Display the memory usage number with at least
                               WIDTH characters. Default 3.
    -n | --num-iters NUM       Exit after NUM intervals. An empty value is
                               interpreted as infinity. Default 1.
    -p | --cpu-width WIDTH     Display the CPU usage number with at least WIDTH
                               characters. Default 4.

To use mem-cpu-stats in your tmux status bar (with colors!), add the following to .tmux.conf:

set -g status-right "#(/path/to/mem-cpu-stats -c tmux)"

In creating this, I discovered that you can have something in your tmux status bar that updates more often than status-interval by printing a new line at the desired interval. What's more, tmux will kill the process and start a new one every time it refreshes the status bar. mem-cpu-stats takes advantage of this to update itself as often as it wants. However, this will cause the entire status bar to update at the same interval as mem-cpu-stats.