System Vitals
Display CPU frequency and usage, GPU utilization, memory consumption, disk space, and battery percentage in the VS Code status bar — including native Apple Silicon GPU monitoring, which needs no elevated privileges.
A fork. System Vitals is a fork of resmon by Nicholas Anderson, adding macOS GPU support and a modernized build. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by the original author. See LICENSE.md for the licensing situation, which is unresolved because the upstream project declares no license.
Features
- CPU — usage percentage and current frequency
- GPU — utilization and memory in use (macOS, including M-series Apple Silicon)
- Memory — consumed out of total
- Disk — space remaining or used, per drive
- Battery — percentage remaining, hidden automatically on devices without a battery
Screenshot
CPU usage, CPU frequency, GPU utilization and memory, running on an Apple Silicon Mac. GPU memory, disk space and CPU temperature are available as well, and are off by default.
Requirements
None beyond VS Code 1.53 or newer. The systeminformation module is bundled with the extension, and macOS GPU statistics are read from the IOKit registry with ioreg, which requires no additional software and no elevated privileges.
Extension Settings
systemvitals.show.cpuusage: Show CPU Usage. In Windows, this percentage is calculated with processor time, which doesn't quite match the task manager figure.systemvitals.show.cpufreq: Show CPU Frequency. This may just display a static frequency on Windows.systemvitals.show.mem: Show consumed and total memory as a fraction.systemvitals.show.battery: Show battery percentage remaining.systemvitals.show.disk: Show disk space information.systemvitals.show.cputemp: Show CPU temperature. May not work without the lm-sensors module on Linux. May require running VS Code as admin on Windows.systemvitals.show.gpu: Show GPU utilization. macOS only; see GPU Monitoring below.systemvitals.show.gpumem: Show GPU memory in use. macOS only; see GPU Monitoring below.systemvitals.gpu.unit: Unit used for GPU memory (GB-B).systemvitals.disk.format: Configures how the disk space is displayed (percentage remaining/used, absolute remaining, used out of totel).systemvitals.disk.drives: Drives to show, by mount point or device name. For example, C: on Windows, /home or /dev/sda1 on Linux. Leave empty to pick sensible volumes automatically; see Disk Space below.systemvitals.updatefrequencyms: How frequently to query systeminformation. The minimum is 200 ms as to prevent accidentally updating so fast as to freeze up your machine.systemvitals.freq.unit: Unit used for the CPU frequency (GHz-Hz).systemvitals.mem.unit: Unit used for the RAM consumption (GB-B).systemvitals.alignLeft: Toggles the alignment of the status bar.systemvitals.color: Color of the status bar text in hex code (for example, #FFFFFF is white). The color must be in the format #RRGGBB, using hex digits.
GPU Monitoring
GPU statistics are macOS only, and work on Apple Silicon (M-series) as well as Intel Macs. They are read from the IOKit registry with ioreg, which requires no elevated privileges — unlike powermetrics, which needs sudo. On any machine that does not report GPU statistics, both GPU metrics hide themselves automatically rather than showing an error.
systemvitals.show.gpu displays GPU utilization as a percentage. This is the driver's instantaneous Device Utilization %, sampled at each update rather than averaged over the interval, so expect it to fluctuate the same way CPU usage does.systemvitals.show.gpumem displays GPU memory as in use / allocated. Note that this is not used-out-of-VRAM: Apple Silicon uses unified memory with no fixed GPU partition, so the second figure is how much system memory the GPU driver has currently claimed, not a fixed capacity. It moves over time.
GPU frequency and GPU power are not available, as both require sudo powermetrics or private APIs.
Linux and Windows GPU monitoring is not implemented; each would need a separate backend (nvidia-smi / /sys/class/drm, and WMI / NVML respectively).
Disk Space
Disk space is off by default. Enable it with systemvitals.show.disk.
macOS reports eight APFS volumes for a single physical disk, so with no disk.drives set the extension picks the one that answers the question. That matters more than it sounds: / on modern macOS is the sealed, read-only system snapshot, and it reports roughly 95% free no matter how full the machine actually is. The volume holding your files is mounted at /System/Volumes/Data, and that is what gets shown, labelled /.
On other platforms every real filesystem is shown. Volumes with no capacity, such as devfs, are skipped everywhere.
To choose specific volumes yourself, set systemvitals.disk.drives to a list of mount points or device names. Anything listed there is shown as-is, including volumes the automatic selection would skip.
Known Issues
A better solution for Windows CPU Usage would be great. I investigated alternatives to counting Processor Time, but none of them seemed to match the Task Manager percentage.
Change Log
See CHANGELOG.md.
