For cpuTopBars on the Mac
cpuTopBars is a free, open-source Mac menu-bar app by Halfmarble LLC (“halfmarble”). It shows a small, live graph of your Mac’s load: CPU and every core, GPU, Neural Engine, memory, disk, battery and Wi-Fi. More about cpuTopBars.
Need help? Email support@halfmarble.com. Include your Mac model, your macOS version, the app’s build number (the number after “b” in the menu’s last item, Quit), and a short description of what happened.
There are two ways. The open beta is on TestFlight now: get Apple’s free TestFlight app from the Mac App
Store, then open the beta’s TestFlight link on your
Mac and install it from TestFlight. A Mac App Store release will follow. Or build it from source: clone
the repository on GitHub, open
cpuTopBars.xcodeproj in Xcode and choose Product > Run.
cpuTopBars needs macOS 27 or later. If it is running and you still cannot see it, your menu bar may be full: macOS hides the items that do not fit, most often on a Mac with a camera notch. Quit another menu-bar app, or hide an item you do not need, to make room.
While Show letters under the bars is on in Settings, the wide bars have a letter under them: B battery, W Wi-Fi, D disk, M memory, N Neural Engine, G GPU, C CPU, E and P the efficiency and performance cores. Rest the pointer on a bar for a second and its reading appears below the menu bar. Click the graph and choose How to Read the Menu Bar... for a window that explains every bar and color with drawn examples.
Click the graph and choose Open cpuTopBars Settings... to open them. There you can choose 2, 5 or 10 updates a second, and switch off groups of bars such as the battery and Wi-Fi bars or the GPU and Neural Engine bars.
Turn on Launch at login in Settings. macOS keeps this setting itself, under Login Items in System Settings; if macOS asks you to approve it, allow it there.
The App Store and TestFlight version runs in Apple’s App Sandbox, which limits what an app may see of other processes. So it ranks your own processes and counts the others in one row, its inspector shows the man page, arguments and environment, and it shows the Neural Engine as on or off and the GPU’s use. The version you build from source runs outside the sandbox: it ranks every user’s processes, adds lsof, nm and sample tabs and a Kill button for your own processes, and shows the Neural Engine’s busy share and the GPU’s power in watts, where they can be read.
cpuTopBars was called upMonitor. A copy you built under the old name keeps its own settings and its own login item, which still opens that copy at login. Turn Launch at login off in the old copy, or delete it, then set your settings and Launch at login again in cpuTopBars, which starts with the default settings.
Click the graph and choose Quit, the last item in the menu. The number beside it, such as “(b120)”, is the build number.
Send feedback from the TestFlight app, or email support@halfmarble.com. Bugs in the source version can also be reported as an issue on GitHub.
No. cpuTopBars is free and open source (MIT). devTopBars is the paid app built on it.
A Mac running macOS 27 or later.
cpuTopBars makes no network requests and collects no data about you: no accounts, no analytics, no ads, no tracking. Read the full privacy policy.