system-graph.py is a simple script to generate text-mode graphs of various system resources. It uses unicode block characters to render the graphs. It was written for use with tmux but works just as well in other contexts.

For the full documentation run system-graph.py --help. The most important command line option is --format. It allows to fully customise how the graph is rendered.

By default, a graph with current stats and nice labels is shown:

system-graph.py can also display a short history of recent stats. For example, the format string CPU:{cpu[:10]} displays the 10 most recent CPU load measurements, again with a nice label.

To conserve space, you can of course remove the labels from the format string and use ANSII escapes or other means of colourisation to make the stats easily discernible. The following screenshot shows how such a graph can look when embedded into the status line of tmux using a horribly long format string.

system-graph.py has a few dependencies:

• Python 3.3 or above
• Linux Kernel 2.6 or above

Since most of the data is obtained from Linux-specific files in /proc, it is unlikely that system-graph.py produces usable results on other operating systems.

Other than that, no installation is required. Simply run the script.

system-graph.py is licensed under the terms of the Expat/MIT license. See the file system-graph.py for details.