plottypusInstall

about

Built by one person, measured on one Mac.

I'm Lay Sheth, a solo developer in India. I write plottypus in Rust on ratatui and test it on a MacBook Pro with an M5 Pro. This page says how, and what that means for the numbers you see.

why

The 0 W bug

On macOS 27 the PMGR energy counters that monitors use for CPU power publish in batches 2–108 s apart, and sometimes not for tens of minutes. Tools that turn each interval's change into watts started printing 0.00 W for a CPU running flat out. plottypus reads the SMC power rails on the M5 Pro instead, and on other chips shows the last published value with its age, or — once it is more than 10 s old.

That is the idea behind the whole app, in one bug: show the number the Mac actually reports, say how old it is, and print — when there is none. The full story, with the captures, is in the macOS 27 post.

verification

How the numbers are checked

1,649

tests across four crates, 0 failing on 24 September 2026

3,626

SMC keys read on the M5 Pro, 285 of them temperatures

0

redraws while idle; one frame per sample otherwise

  • Golden screens

    Tests paint the whole app from fixed fixtures for the whole Mac family: fanless Airs, desktops without a battery, and M1 to M5, including Pro, Max and Ultra. Any change that moves a visible cell fails them.

  • Measurements carry a date

    Every measured figure is recorded with its machine, macOS version, date and source, and the site prints from that one list. Self-cost comes from perf-smoke.py: 3 fresh processes, 5 s warm-up, 20 s window each, median; CPU from proc_pid_rusage.

  • One Mac, said plainly

    plottypus has run on real hardware on one Mac: a MacBook Pro with an M5 Pro (Mac17,8): 6 Super + 12 Performance cores, 20-core GPU, 24 GB, on macOS 27.0. Other chips run from per-chip tables pinned by fixture tests. If yours is different, the output of plottypus doctor by email is the most useful report you can send.

privacy

Privacy

The app makes no network connections. The site sets no cookies. Vercel counts page views and load times.

No account, no telemetry, no update check. The fonts on this site are self-hosted and it loads no third-party scripts. The full policy is on /privacy; security reports go to /security.

colophon

Colophon

App
Rust, ratatui; one arm64 binary, about 2.2 MB
Site
Astro, static HTML; a few lines of script for copy buttons and the frame player
Type
JetBrains Mono and IBM Plex Sans, plus a braille font drawn for this site
Frames
Captured from the 1.0.0 binary and set as text, not images
Colours
The app's own palette; colour marks data, never decoration

contact

Contact

hello@plottypus.com

Bug reports, a Mac I haven't tested, or a number you think is wrong. Writing about plottypus? The press kit has the facts and the images.