Vitals - Native macOS System Monitor

Project Overview

Your Mac already knows its own temperature, fan speed, and battery health — Apple just never surfaced it. Vitals reads those sensors directly from the hardware and shows them in a native window that looks like it shipped with macOS. It is free, open source, and Apple Silicon only.

The goal was never “another third-party monitor with a busy dashboard.” It was a tool that feels first-party: SwiftUI throughout, native controls, no Electron shell, no bundled Chromium. It reads the System Management Controller and IOKit for chip temperature, per-fan RPM, and battery cycle count and wear, then renders them the way Settings would.

Monorepo Layout

Vitals is a Turborepo monorepo driven by Bun workspaces. The desktop app under apps/desktop is pure Swift / SwiftUI built with Swift Package Manager. The marketing site under apps/website is React + Vite + Tailwind, with a Convex backend. turbo orchestrates build, lint, and test across both so one command covers the whole tree.

Release Channels

The app ships in three channels that install side by side with separate apps, icons, and settings: Stable (main, curated weekly release), Nightly (rolling pre-release off the integration branch, auto-updates), and Dev (local-only builds, no updater). Each push to main publishes a full GitHub Release with a versioned DMG; every merge to nightly auto-publishes a rolling pre-release. Distribution runs through a Homebrew cask tap with direct DMG as the fallback.

Applications & Cleanup

Beyond sensors, Vitals includes a native app-cleanup feature — finding where macOS apps leave files behind and removing them safely. That work is informed by the Mole project’s battle-tested catalog of leftover locations and its safety-first uninstall design, reimplemented natively in Swift.

License

GPL-3.0. Free software you may use, study, modify, and redistribute under the same terms. © Syntax Lab Technology.