Nifty Monitor
CPU, memory and disk usage in the status bar, including on remote SSH machines and dev containers.
Maintained. No sign-in. No telemetry. Works in VS Code, Cursor, Windsurf, VSCodium and other editors that use Open VSX.
Features
- Live stats in the status bar. CPU, memory and (optionally) free disk space, updated every 2 seconds.
- Shows the machine your code runs on. Connected with Remote SSH, WSL or a dev container? Nifty Monitor reports that machine, not your laptop. Handy for seeing why a build on a remote server is slow.
- Accurate memory on Linux. Uses available memory (like
free and htop) instead of the misleading "free" figure that counts cache as used.
- Warning colours. Items turn yellow above 80% and red above 95% (both configurable).
- Details on hover and click. Host, OS, CPU model and cores, load average, memory, disk and uptime.
- Copy System Info. One command copies all of that, ready to paste into a bug report.
- Costs nothing in the background. Updates pause while VS Code isn't the focused window.
Commands
| Command |
What it does |
Nifty Monitor: Show System Details |
Show all stats (with a Copy button) |
Nifty Monitor: Copy System Info |
Copy the stats to the clipboard |
Nifty Monitor: Show / Hide in Status Bar |
Toggle the status bar items |
Settings
| Setting |
Default |
What it does |
nifty.monitor.items |
["cpu", "memory"] |
Items to show, in order: cpu, memory, disk |
nifty.monitor.refreshInterval |
2 |
Seconds between updates |
nifty.monitor.memoryFormat |
used |
used (7.9 GB / 16 GB) or percent (49%) |
nifty.monitor.diskPath |
(empty) |
Disk to show; empty means the workspace's disk |
nifty.monitor.warningThreshold |
80 |
Percentage that turns an item yellow |
nifty.monitor.errorThreshold |
95 |
Percentage that turns an item red |
nifty.monitor.alignment |
right |
Status bar side |
nifty.monitor.priority |
50 |
Position within that side |
Install
- VS Code: search for "Nifty Monitor" in the Extensions view, or install from the Visual Studio Marketplace.
- Cursor, Windsurf, VSCodium, Kiro, Antigravity: install from Open VSX.
Privacy
This extension collects no telemetry, needs no account and makes no network requests. Stats never leave your machine.
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- Nifty Save as Root: Edit Protected Files with sudo: Save files you don't have permission to write: Retry as Root when a save fails, or Save as Root with sudo, keeping owner, group and mode. Open unreadable files as root too. Linux, macOS, SSH, WSL. (Open VSX)
- Nifty Struct Layout: C/C++ Struct Padding: See the memory layout of C and C++ structs: offsets, sizes, alignment and padding on hover and inline, a fix that reorders fields to save space, and hex, binary and char hovers for numbers. (Open VSX)
- Nifty Buttons: Custom Status Bar Buttons: Add your own buttons to the status bar: run commands, shell commands, tasks or links, per project and only for the files they apply to. (Open VSX)
- Nifty Code Metrics: Complexity & Hotspots: Complexity and size for every function in any language, as CodeLens and warnings, plus a hotspots view of the complex files that change most often. (Open VSX)
See all 100+ Nifty extensions and web tools at https://getnifty.dev
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