NetSpeedMonitor

A minimal macOS menu bar app that shows your live upload/download speed.

Fork notice This is a personal fork of elegracer/NetSpeedMonitor, customized to my own taste. All credit for the original app and its network sampling core goes to the upstream author. Licensed under MIT (see LICENSE).

It reads per-interface byte counters via sysctl (a small C++/Objective-C++ core) and renders the speeds directly into the menu bar.

What this fork changes

Compared to upstream, this version:

• Always shows MB/s — no automatic unit switching between B/KB/MB/GB.

• Selectable refresh interval — pick 0.5s / 1s / 2s / 5s from the menu. Per-second rates are time-normalized, so the number stays correct at any interval.

• Bigger, bolder, monospaced-digit readout that's easier to read at a glance.

• Monochrome speed shading — each line's opacity reflects its speed band, so you can tell the throughput range without reading the number:

  Band	Speed	Shade
  Fast	≥ 1 MB/s	full strength
  Moderate	0.1 – 1 MB/s	70% opacity
  Slow	0.01 – 0.1	55% opacity
  Idle	< 0.01 MB/s	40% opacity

• Arrows on the right of the figures (12.34 ↑ / 1.23 ↓), with tightened line and edge spacing.

• Compact menu — clicking the readout shows session totals (with a reset), an on-demand speed test, the refresh interval, Launch at Login, the version, and Quit.

• One-click speed test — runs the built-in macOS networkQuality tool (~15 s) and shows download / upload (MB/s) and responsiveness (RPM) in the menu. While it runs the live readout climbs as usual; when it finishes the readout blinks in your accent colour. Requires the App Sandbox to be off (so the tool can be launched), hence this build is unsandboxed.

• Modernized internals — the state layer uses Swift's @Observable macro and async/await instead of Combine + Timer.

• 64-bit byte counters — samples via NET_RT_IFLIST2 / if_data64, so the counters never wrap (no 4 GB roll-over math).

Features

1. Live upload/download speed in the menu bar (MB/s).
2. Selectable refresh interval (0.5–5 s).
3. Session totals (received / sent) with a reset.
4. One-click speed test via networkQuality (download / upload / responsiveness).
5. Launch at login.
6. Quit.

Requirements

• macOS 14.6 or later.
• Built with SwiftUI; the UI lives entirely in the menu bar (no Dock icon).

Building

Open NetSpeedMonitor.xcodeproj in Xcode and run the NetSpeedMonitor scheme.

License

MIT — inherited from the upstream project. See LICENSE.