What is netwatch?

netwatch is a terminal dashboard that shows how much data your computer is sending and receiving over the network, right now, drawn as a colorful two-sided bar chart. Outgoing traffic climbs upward from a center line while incoming traffic falls downward from the same line, with the newest reading always appearing on the right and older readings scrolling off to the left as time passes. It runs as a script for a tool called yeet, and reads live network counters straight from the operating system's kernel without needing administrator or root access, since yeet exposes those counters over its own unprivileged connection. The kernel only tracks total bytes sent and received over time, so netwatch samples those totals twice a second and calculates the difference between samples to get an actual speed, which it then keeps a short rolling history of so the chart can scroll smoothly. You can pick which network interface to watch, such as a wired connection, a WireGuard tunnel, or a Docker network, or view all of them combined, switching between them with arrow keys, a mouse click on a dropdown, or the scroll wheel. Hovering or dragging across the chart shows the exact speed at that point in time along with how long ago it was recorded. The whole display uses a purple, magenta, and gold color gradient for outgoing traffic and a cooler blue and cyan gradient for incoming traffic, giving it a retro synthwave look, and it reports speeds using standard units like kilobytes and megabytes per second. Installation is a single command that installs the yeet runtime and then runs netwatch directly from its GitHub repository, and it currently only supports Linux. The project is released under the GPL-2.0 license.