Introduction

What is permon?

Permon is a tool to display live line charts in a clear, uncluttered way. Permon comes prepackaged with a lot of useful stats for monitoring the performance of your PC. It is developed with a focus on only showing you things you care about, not everything you can monitor in your system.

Permon is developed in Python 3. There is a good chance you already have Python on your system. If not, install it (recommended: Miniconda). Run pip install permon in your preferred command line and permon --help to see what you can do with permon or take a look at the documentation for a more in-depth guide.

Permon works everywhere

Permon is designed to work everywhere. It supports Windows, Linux and soon Mac OS.
But what if you don't have access to a desktop manager? Or want to check performance of your workstation remotely? Permon has you covered. You can choose from three frontends. A terminal frontend, native frontend and browser frontend.

Permon is extensible

Permon can easily be enhanced by adding custom stats. And Permon has, in my biased opinion, done a very good job of making this as intuitive as possible. The code snippet below shows how a custom stat looks like. See the documentation on extending Permon to learn how to add your first custom stat.

import math
from permon.backend import Stat

class SineStat(Stat):
    base_tag = 'sine'
    name = 'Sine'

    def __init__(self, fps):
        self.t = 0
        super(SineStat, self).__init__(fps)

    def get_stat(self):
        self.t += 1 / self.fps
        return math.sin(self.t)

    @property
    def minimum(self):
        return -1

    @property
    def maximum(self):
        return 1

Permon is open source

Permon is open source and published on Github. What makes Permon special is that it has many components like

• Object orientation in Python
• Drawing in a terminal
• Developing a GUI app in Python
• Making a secure web server, including communication via WebSockets
• Automatically generating documentation via Sphinx
• Unit testing the Python code
• Continous Integration via CircleCI

while still being relatively small (~2k LoC) and thus easy to get into for a beginner — especially because a huge focus has been put on documentation during development. Check out the Contributor documentation to see how permon works and how you can improve it.