Hi everyone,

Vitals 1.8 is out. It’s the biggest update since launch.

Vitals is a menu bar activity monitor for macOS. It counts every helper process under the app it belongs to, keeps up to a year of history, and shows your dev servers, coding agents, and AI plan limits.

What’s new in 1.8:

• The vitals command. Everything Vitals sees, now in Terminal: the whole Mac, the apps using the most, ports and dev servers by project, coding agents, and what’s left of your AI plans. You get a readable table, or JSON for scripts.

• Install with Homebrew. brew install --cask foredotstudio/tap/vitals installs the app and the command together.

• Safe stopping. vitals can-quit says whether something is safe to quit. vitals stop --idle stops the dev servers nobody is using, after you say yes.

• A free trial. Use every feature for 3 days, with no account and no card.

New pricing:

• $9 for a year of updates. It’s not a subscription: the app keeps working after the year.
• $15 for life at the launch price ($39 after).

Both are paid once, with a 14-day refund.

Download: vitalsmac.com/download
What’s new: vitalsmac.com/changelog/1.8

I’d love your feedback, especially if you live in Terminal.

Vitals 1.7 is out. It installs from inside the app: Vitals → Check for Updates.

What's left of your AI plans

For Claude, Codex, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Antigravity, Grok, Ollama and OpenCode: how much of the week and the 5-hour session is left, when each resets, and whether you're on pace or will run out first. It covers every account signed in on your Mac, including several Claude Code profiles. Turn it on in Settings → Integrations → Usage Limits.

In the menu bar

What's left of a plan can sit in the menu bar like any other reading, each provider after its own mark.

An Agents tab

Every coding agent running on your Mac, Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI and the rest: the project it works in, whether it's working or waiting for you, and everything it started. Quit a session and everything it started goes with it.

Tokens

How many tokens Claude Code and Codex used today and this week, and which models used them.

Also

- The dropdown's Overview has Agents and Containers tiles

- The strain notice can be hidden with a right-click or in Settings

- Fixed: the GPU tab no longer shows "Measuring…" when you open it again

- Fixed: the menu bar temperature graph shows past readings again

Every update is included with your AppSumo code. The full notes are at vitalsmac.com/changelog/1.7

Vitals 1.6 is out. 🎉

It is about the past: how far back Vitals remembers and how you get the numbers out.

A year of history

Vitals kept 30 days. Now you choose 30 days, 90 days, 6 months, or a year. A year takes about 30 MB on your Mac.

Export CSV

One click saves three files: your apps by day, your Mac by hour, and the readings every five minutes. They open in Numbers, Excel, or any spreadsheet.

Peaks

An average hides the ten minutes your Mac ran flat out. The new Peaks card shows the highest CPU, memory pressure, temperature, and power in the time you chose, and when each was. Under it are the stretches your Mac spent at a limit, and for how long.

A limit for one app

Vitals tells you when a browser passes 8 GB or an editor stays above 200% CPU, at the limit and for the minutes you set. An app that is meant to be busy can be muted until tomorrow or for good.

Also new:

- When a reading in the menu bar turns red, the dropdown says which one, the limit it crossed, and for how long

- Claude, Codex and Cursor can ask Vitals about the past, like when your Mac was at a limit this week

What should Vitals remember or export that it does not yet?

Every Mac with Apple Silicon has a Neural Engine. More apps use it every month for dictation, transcription, and other AI that runs on the Mac.

Activity Monitor doesn't show it. I had no way to see how busy it was or which app was using it.

So Vitals now shows it.

- Neural Engine: how hard it's working, which apps are using it, and a chart of the last minutes. It can sit in the menu bar, and Vitals tells you when an app has kept it busy for 20 minutes.

- Customize: Vitals looks one way, the way I like it. Now you pick the chart colors, the font for the numbers, compact spacing, charts that go back 30 minutes, and a window that floats on top.

- Red under strain: readings in the menu bar can turn red when the CPU, memory, disk, or heat is under strain, so you only look when something is red.

Everything is on one page in Settings, with a preview that changes as you choose.

The color set I'd point you to is Accessible. It stays easy to tell apart with color blindness.

If you could change one thing about how Vitals looks, what would it be?

AI assistants already work on my Mac. They start dev servers, run builds, and when something is slow, they try to find out why.

All they see is a thousand process names, so they guess. And when they clean up, they can't tell a dev server I forgot last week from the database I'm working in.

So Vitals now answers them.

• Ask: what is slowing the Mac down, which app is behind a number, what is on port 3000, which dev servers have sat idle for days.

• Quit: an assistant can't quit anything by itself. Vitals shows you the request in its own window, and nothing is quit until you say so.

• Share: it's off until you turn it on, and you choose what assistants may see.

Setup is one page in Settings. Turn it on, click Add beside Claude, Codex, or Cursor, and that's it.

On my own Mac, the first thing it found was a dev server that had been running for 16 hours and holding 3.8 GB. I had no idea it was still there.

If you let an assistant work on your Mac, what do you wish it knew before it touches anything?