macOS system dashboard for your terminal. No sudo, no mouse.

whirr-demo.mp4

Why

We spent years in fancy web UIs. Now we are back in the terminal, hours a day.

So I wanted this in the same window. Not another app to alt-tab to.

Then I added what I keep losing track of. Localhost servers, because I run a few projects at once and always forget one. Claude sessions, because I run several agents in parallel and I want to know which one is cooking the machine. And which one is still going while I am not looking. My opinion on Claude Code is well known.

Install

brew install scoobynko/whirr/whirr

No Homebrew, or Homebrew is shouting at you about Xcode:

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -LsSf https://github.com/scoobynko/whirr/releases/latest/download/whirr-installer.sh | sh

Rust toolchain:

cargo install whirr

Then run whirr.

Apple Silicon only. Intel Macs don't expose the power channels this reads, so there would be nothing to show.

Keys

tab	move between cards
↑ ↓	move inside one
c m	sort processes by cpu, by memory
d	what a Claude session is doing. in full
o	open a dev server in your browser, or jump to the terminal a Claude session runs in
k	kill it. asks first
s	settings: theme, accent, background, fan
q	quit

Settings stick in ~/.config/whirr/config.toml.

Claude sessions

Every session that is running, whether or not it holds a port. With what it is doing next to it.

Filled circle is working. Half filled is running with nobody watching. Hollow is waiting for you. The word says which. busy ×2 counts subagents, loop 4m counts down to a wakeup the session set for itself, bg job is a shell that outlived its turn, scheduled is one a cron or a /schedule wakes up, idle 14d is one you forgot about.

Amber means it is running without you. That is the whole point of the card.

The subagent count is the one number here that is a guess. Nothing on disk says when an agent finishes, so whirr counts the ones whose logs are still being written. An agent that has finished stays on the count for a few minutes after. Everything else on the card is read, not inferred.

None of this is guessed from CPU. Claude Code writes its own busy flag and whirr reads it. A session that says it is busy but stopped writing goes amber too, because that one is stuck, not working.

Second account included. whirr reads every ~/.claude* config root, not just the default one.

d opens the rest. Which subagent, on which task, the real command a background shell is running, the full path, the account, how long it has been open.

scheduled reads the cron itself, so it shows up the moment you set one, not after it first fires. No countdown though. The schedule runs on the server and the next fire time is written nowhere, so whirr tells you it happens, and how often. Not when.

Performance

Under 0.5% CPU, under 25 MB, left running all day.

The process table is read with raw libproc calls, about 1 ms a pass instead of the 35 ms a full sysinfo refresh costs. Three sampler threads at 2, 5 and 10 seconds. The screen redraws only when something changed.

Working out what every Claude session is doing costs about 4 ms, on the 10 second tick. Transcripts are read 64 KB from the tail, and only for the sessions sitting still. The one writing to its own log never pays for it.

One network request

Once a day whirr asks crates.io if there is a newer version, and says so in the footer if there is. Nothing else leaves your machine. --no-update-check and there are no requests at all.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.