lifehacker.com — If you like to monitor your system using age-old command line tools like uptime and top, you want the free GeekTool on your Mac. Today we'll cover how to automatically embed command output, text files and even monitoring images - like web site traffic charts - onto your Mac desktop with GeekTool.
Mar 14, 2007 View in Crawl 4
renz87Mar 15, 2007
@stevemax Instead of bashing him you bash windows.... typical
twangoMar 15, 2007
Finally, something -useful-
biff198Mar 15, 2007
it's cool.. there were only two things that I was frustrated by while trying it out. The first was the opacity. For some reason, when I dropped the opacity all the way to 0, I could still see the window, and I really didn't want to. The second was the fact that I use revolving desktop images, that change all the time. Some of them are light colored, and some of them are almost completely black. There was no obvious way of being able to see the text at all times, regardless of the background, minus setting the opacity (here we are again) to a high enough percentage, but who wants to see that window all the time? I want to just have the text floating on my desktop...
Closed AccountMar 15, 2007
Does it have a meter that will give me an idea of how much of my money goes down the s**t hole every time I have to throw away my Mac and buy a new one?
rampancyMar 15, 2007
This has been around for a while - I've been using it since my 10.2/10.3 days on my Power Mac and iBook, and it works great as a UB on my MacBook Pro. I like to use it to output cal and date to my desktop; much more handy and convenient than using something like MenuCalendarClock or Apple's own dashboard widgets; it's also easier on system resources too which makes it great for lower-end or older Macs (Hint: format date to omit the seconds display and set it to update every 60 seconds - this substantially cuts down on the amount of CPU that GeekTool uses).I also love to use it to monitor my system.log and console.log files in real time - they're great troubleshooting tools for figuring out why apps unexpectedly quit or crash.
schutzausMar 15, 2007
I suggest "w" instead of "uptime", w gives you the uptime AND which users are logged in an what they are doing.eg: 15:18:13 up 95 days, 21:19, 4 users, load average: 0.01, 0.03, 0.00USER TTY LOGIN@ IDLE JCPU PCPU WHATbert pts/1 03Mar07 22:24m 5:30m 5:30m python hellanzb.pybert pts/2 03Mar07 22:23m 8:51 8:51 /usr/bin/python /usr/bin/paster serve hella.inibert pts/4 05Mar07 11:52m 1:24m 1:24m mc -xbert pts/6 05Mar07 0.00s 7:20 0.01s w
mizzackMar 15, 2007
Been using geektool for a while now. It does a lot more than show output of commands. You can run scripts periodically and conditionally show certain output based on the result of the script...I also have a link to the weather.com radar map refreshing every 45 seconds.It's a seriously powerful tool and I can't praise it highly enough. I just wish that you didn't have to move the output around when you switch displays or resolutions.
mizzackMar 15, 2007
One time I had capslock on and discovered that typing "UPTIME" has the same output as "w". Crazy, huh?
mzimMar 16, 2007
Excellent Tool!Very good Tutorial, Thanks!
gmillerdOct 28, 2007
customer service is ---------> that way