ttyload: Choosy text-only geeks choose ttyload

Start up ttyload and you’ll see hints of things like tload, nload and even htop, in a way.

As far as system monitors go, ttyload really only relays the load averages over time, but the scrolling effect from right to left, and the addition of on-screen timestamps makes it a very enjoyable tool.

I can’t say if ttyload was taking a cue from nload or tload, but it’s clearly a step up. And if you’re confused by the colors, note that the asterisks change color where lines intersect, which is how the legend is useful.

Other than that, there’s not a lot that ttyload does. You might find it useful as something to run on the bottom-most desktop layer, or in a separate panel in your terminal multiplexer.

For my own part, I prefer to use it as one of many nifty screensavers. 😉

A note or two for Arch users: At the time of this writing, the AUR package was pointing at the wrong source, and was out of date. That being said, the 0.5.3 version wouldn’t build for me, but the 0.5.2 would, but only if I built it by hand and without the PKGBUILD on that page.

Of course, the Debian versions were fine. 😀