alt Hacker NewsShow HN: I got tired of btop not seeing my Mac's chip, so I built siltop
btop is beautiful. But on my M-series Mac it can't tell me the one thing I actually want to know: what is the chip doing? No watts, no GPU, no per-core clocks.
So I built siltop: btop's calm, with eyes on the silicon. Real power, clocks and temps straight from the SMC and IOReport, no sudo, about 1.3% of one core (btop is ~2.5% on the same machine).
It also tells you what's wrong in plain words ("Busy: rustc using 9.1 cores", "Hot: fans at 80%") before you read a single graph.
10-second try, no load needed:
brew install cloaky233/tap/siltop && siltop --demo
Curious what your Mac shows. M1/M2 Ultra and M5 Max owners especially, I haven't seen yours yet.
Comments
This is nice, however why build this when you could have raised a PR to btop to add support directly into it?
No mention of Rust in repo description and every 4 sentences?! Thanks, I’ll look at it! I didn’t know I miss those things until reading README ;(
If you don't bother to write your own announcement, I don't bother to look at your thing.
I hate this "witty" Claude speak where it tries so hard to be cool:
>I haven't seen yours yet
>, in the terminal you already live in
>truth
>Everything is optional
I can't really put my finger to it why, but type of writing pisses me off so much.
So in 2026, it is more efficient to waste thousands of tokens on rolling your own slop version, rather than adding a feature to something that already exists.
Something like btop has been there for decades and will continue to do so where as this slop tool will be unmaintained or even deleted in a year.
These descriptions are borderline insulting
> No sudo, no telemetry
Does it also not nuke your kernel? does it also not inject a keylogger? How will I know if it doesn't tell me! /s
hello
Please, please, take the time to write READMEs by hand. It at least shows intentionality.