Pulse — Mac Health

What Is It

pulse is a macOS system health and performance tool that fills the gaps left by Activity Monitor, iStat Menus, and CleanMyMac. It gives you a single health score for your Mac, finds resource hogs, scans for cleanup opportunities, and tracks trends over time.

It runs as both a CLI tool and a native SwiftUI menu bar app.

Key Features

Health Score (0–100)

A composite metric across six categories: CPU load, memory pressure, disk usage, thermal state, battery health, and runaway processes. Each category has explainable deductions — you know exactly what's dragging your score down.

Resource Hog Finder

Identifies CPU-intensive and memory-hungry processes with actionable suggestions. Not just "Chrome is using 4GB" but context about whether that's abnormal.

Cleanup Scanner

Finds reclaimable space in caches, logs, Xcode DerivedData, old downloads, and trash. Interactive confirmation with extra safety for items over 1GB. No sudo required.

Predictive Trend Analysis

Records snapshots to a local SQLite database and answers questions like "when will I run out of memory at this rate?" and "how has my system changed over the past week?"

Time Travel

Compare your current system state against any previous snapshot — what changed, what got worse, what improved.

Network Diagnostics

WiFi signal quality (RSSI, SNR, channel), throughput measurement, active connections grouped by service, and ARP-based home device discovery.

Architecture

Built in pure Swift with zero external dependencies. Everything uses macOS system frameworks:

• IOKit for battery and thermal sensors
• CoreWLAN for WiFi diagnostics
• Mach kernel for CPU metrics
• SQLite3 (bundled) for historical data
• SwiftUI + Charts for the menu bar app

No sudo, no elevated permissions, no third-party libraries.

CLI Commands

pulse status     — System dashboard with gauges
pulse score      — Health score with breakdown
pulse hot        — Resource hogs with suggestions
pulse clean      — Cleanup scanner (dry-run or confirm)
pulse history    — Sparkline trends (1h to 7d)
pulse trend      — Predictive analysis
pulse diff       — Compare current vs past state
pulse apps       — Per-app resource profiling
pulse changelog  — Track app installs/updates/removals
pulse watch      — Live-updating terminal dashboard
pulse net        — Network overview with subcommands

Why "Pulse"?

It started life as hk (short for "housekeeping"), but hk turned out to be a registered command in Homebrew. Pulse is a better name anyway — it's what the tool actually gives you: a live sense of how your Mac is doing, where things are trending, and when something needs attention.

Why I Built It

Every Mac monitoring tool is either too simple (Activity Monitor), too expensive (iStat Menus), or doesn't track history. None of them answer "is my Mac getting worse over time?" or "which app has been eating the most CPU this week?"

pulse does, in a single zero-dependency binary.