vitals-cosmic

Your system's vital signs, live in the COSMIC panel.

A native libcosmic applet that pins your favorite temperature, fan, voltage, memory, CPU, network, storage, battery, and GPU sensors straight onto the COSMIC desktop panel. Zero GTK runtime, shared backend with the GNOME Shell extension, and ready for Gentoo.

Why • Features • Architecture • Install • Usage • Configuration • Status • Development

Live chip row in the COSMIC panel -- CPU, memory, temperature, and storage updating in real time.

Why vitals-cosmic?

Most system monitors on COSMIC are either full-screen GTK apps or drop-in clones of GNOME extensions that drag a GTK runtime along for the ride. vitals-cosmic is a single Rust binary built directly against libcosmic and iced -- so it looks, themes, and moves exactly like the rest of the COSMIC panel.

• Native libcosmic / iced -- no GTK, no WebKit, no Electron. One binary, sized and themed by cosmic-panel itself.
• Shared backend with vitals-rs -- the same vitals-daemon that powers the Fedora GTK4 app and the GNOME Shell extension. Switch desktops, keep your sensors.
• Config round-trips through D-Bus -- every preferences change hits SetConfig on the daemon, so ~/.config/vitals/config.toml stays canonical across every client.
• Zero sensor-reading code in the applet -- all 10 sensor categories come from the daemon's 4 RPCs. The applet is a thin presentation layer, nothing more.
• Star-to-pin -- any sensor in the popup can be pinned into the panel chip row and will persist across sessions, reboots, and desktop swaps.
• Gentoo-ready -- ships with a skeleton ebuild at gentoo/app-admin/vitals-cosmic/, drop it into a personal overlay and emerge --ask.

Features

Feature	What it does
Panel chip row	One (icon value) chip per pinned sensor, sized by autosize so cosmic-panel stops clipping it
Category popup	Full dropdown of temperature / voltage / fan / memory / CPU / system / network / storage / battery / GPU
Star-to-pin	Tap the star on any sensor to promote it to the panel; persists through SetConfig
Hover history	Sparkline + min/avg/max/last for the sensor your cursor is on, generation-guarded so stale responses can't paint over fresh ones
Preferences sub-popup	Update interval, higher precision, alphabetize, hide zeros, temperature unit, memory/storage units, public IP toggle, monitor command
Graceful degradation	"Daemon unreachable" state with a Retry button -- no crash loop, no zombie panel button
Shared config	Reads and writes ~/.config/vitals/config.toml through the daemon -- same file the GNOME extension and GTK4 app use
Launch monitor	Footer action spawns your configured system monitor (btop by default)
Session auto-activation	D-Bus .service file starts vitals-daemon on the first RPC, no systemd unit needed
Themed symbolic icons	12 embedded SVGs tinted at runtime from the active COSMIC theme's foreground color
Clean release build	lto = "thin" + strip = true + codegen-units = 1, ~20 MiB binary, no warnings

Architecture

                    +------------------+
                    |   vitals-core    |    Pure Rust library
                    |                  |    Shared with vitals-rs
                    |  Sensors, Config |    via cargo path dep
                    |  Format, History |
                    +--------+---------+
                             |
                             v
                    +------------------+
                    |  vitals-daemon   |    D-Bus service
                    |                  |    com.corecoding.Vitals
                    |  Polls sensors   |    session bus
                    |  on a timer      |
                    +--------+---------+
                             |
                             | D-Bus (GetReadings, GetTimeSeries,
                             |        SetConfig, ReadingsChanged)
                             |
                    +--------v---------+
                    |  vitals-cosmic   |    libcosmic applet
                    |                  |    (this crate)
                    |  Panel button +  |    Loaded by cosmic-panel
                    |  category popup  |    as a child process
                    +------------------+

Component	Description
vitals-core	Sensor discovery, hwmon parsing, TOML config, value formatting, history. Lives in vitals-rs; pulled in as a Cargo path dep.
vitals-daemon	Headless session-bus D-Bus service from vitals-rs. Auto-activated via com.corecoding.Vitals.service on first RPC.
vitals-cosmic	This crate. D-Bus client + iced Application + panel button + category popup + preferences sub-popup.

The applet holds zero sensor-reading code. Everything flows through four RPCs on com.corecoding.Vitals.Sensors (GetReadings, GetTextReadings, GetTimeSeries, GetConfig / SetConfig). That matches the GNOME Shell extension's architecture, so all three clients stay in sync.

Install

Build from source (recommended)

git clone https://github.com/NicksLameCode/vitals-rs.git ../vitals-rs
git clone https://github.com/NicksLameCode/vitals-cosmic.git
cd vitals-cosmic
cargo build --release

The release binary lands at target/release/vitals-cosmic. Rust 1.85+ is required for edition 2024.

Gentoo ebuild

A skeleton ebuild lives at gentoo/app-admin/vitals-cosmic/. Drop it into a personal overlay and adjust SRC_URI for whichever tag you cut. It RDEPENDs on app-admin/vitals-rs (also not in ::gentoo -- write a companion ebuild).

sudo cp -r gentoo/app-admin/vitals-cosmic /var/db/repos/local/app-admin/
sudo ebuild /var/db/repos/local/app-admin/vitals-cosmic/vitals-cosmic-0.1.0.ebuild manifest
sudo emerge --ask app-admin/vitals-cosmic

Enable it in the COSMIC panel

Edit ~/.config/cosmic/com.system76.CosmicPanel.Panel/v1/plugins_wings and add "com.corecoding.VitalsCosmic" to one of the wing lists:

Some(([
    "com.system76.CosmicPanelWorkspacesButton",
    "com.system76.CosmicPanelAppButton",
], [
    "com.system76.CosmicAppletStatusArea",
    "com.corecoding.VitalsCosmic",
    "com.system76.CosmicAppletAudio",
    // ... rest of the right wing
]))

Reload the panel:

kill -HUP $(pgrep ^cosmic-panel$)

cosmic-session respawns it automatically.

Manual install (user-local, no ebuild)

# 1. Install the daemon from vitals-rs
install -Dm755 ../vitals-rs/target/release/vitals-daemon ~/.local/bin/vitals-daemon
install -Dm644 /dev/stdin ~/.local/share/dbus-1/services/com.corecoding.Vitals.service <<EOF
[D-BUS Service]
Name=com.corecoding.Vitals
Exec=$HOME/.local/bin/vitals-daemon
EOF

# 2. Install vitals-cosmic
install -Dm755 target/release/vitals-cosmic ~/.local/bin/vitals-cosmic
install -Dm644 data/com.corecoding.VitalsCosmic.desktop \
    ~/.local/share/applications/com.corecoding.VitalsCosmic.desktop
install -Dm644 data/icons/cpu-symbolic.svg \
    ~/.local/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/apps/com.corecoding.VitalsCosmic-symbolic.svg

# 3. Patch the desktop file's Exec= to an absolute path
#    (cosmic-panel's PATH does NOT include ~/.local/bin)
sed -i "s|^Exec=vitals-cosmic$|Exec=$HOME/.local/bin/vitals-cosmic|" \
    ~/.local/share/applications/com.corecoding.VitalsCosmic.desktop

Dependencies

• Rust 1.85+ (edition 2024)
• cosmic-base -- provides cosmic-panel and the rest of the COSMIC session. On Gentoo this comes from the pop-os-overlay or cosmic-overlay.
• A running vitals-daemon from vitals-rs, either system-wide or in ~/.local/bin with a matching D-Bus service file.

Usage

Once the applet is wired into cosmic-panel, click it to open the category popup, where you can:

• Expand any category to see its sensors
• Click the star next to a sensor to pin or unpin it from the panel chip row
• Hover a sensor row to see its sparkline + min/avg/max/last history summary
• Hit Refresh to force an immediate daemon poll
• Hit Open monitor to launch btop (or whatever you set monitor_cmd to)
• Hit Preferences to open the settings sub-popup

Verify the daemon is reachable

dbus-send --session --print-reply \
    --dest=com.corecoding.Vitals /com/corecoding/Vitals \
    com.corecoding.Vitals.Sensors.GetReadings

You should see a dict of (label, value, category, format) tuples. If the daemon isn't running, D-Bus auto-activation via the .service file will start it on demand.

Standalone dev loop

COSMIC_PANEL_APPLET=1 ./target/release/vitals-cosmic

Opens a floating popup window instead of embedding in the panel -- useful for iterating on the popup view without reloading cosmic-panel every time.

Feature status vs the GNOME extension

	vitals-cosmic	GNOME extension (vitals-rs/extension/)
Panel hot-sensors row	✅	✅
Category popup with star-to-pin	✅	✅
Preferences dialog	✅	✅
Refresh / launch-monitor / preferences footer	✅	✅
Daemon-unreachable state with Retry	✅	✅
Config shared across clients via SetConfig	✅	✅
Hover history	✅ sparkline + min/avg/max/last	✅ Cairo line graph
i18n (gettext)	🚧	✅ (20 langs)
Drag-to-reorder hot sensors in prefs	🚧	✅
canvas::Program-based line graph	🚧 follow-up	n/a

The sparkline hover summary is a placeholder -- replacing it with a proper iced canvas::Program needs a pinned libcosmic commit so the generic Theme/Renderer bounds stay stable between builds.

Configuration

Config lives at ~/.config/vitals/config.toml, shared with vitals-rs. The applet reads it at startup and pushes every preferences change back through com.corecoding.Vitals.Sensors.SetConfig(toml) so the daemon owns the canonical copy.

Relevant sections

[general]
update_time = 5              # Seconds between daemon polls (1-60)
use_higher_precision = false # Extra decimal digit in values
alphabetize = true           # Sort sensors alphabetically within each section
hide_zeros = false           # Hide rows whose value is exactly 0
monitor_cmd = "btop"         # Launched by the "Open monitor" footer button

[temperature]
unit = 0                     # 0 = Celsius, 1 = Fahrenheit

[memory]
measurement = 1              # 0 = binary (GiB), 1 = decimal (GB)

[storage]
measurement = 1              # 0 = binary (GiB), 1 = decimal (GB)

[network]
include_public_ip = true     # Include public IP in the network section

# Keys of sensors pinned onto the panel chip row. Set via star toggle in
# the popup; max 4 visible on the panel at once.
hot_sensors = [
    "_memory_usage_",
    "_processor_total_",
]

See the vitals-rs config reference for the full list of fields.

Development

git clone https://github.com/NicksLameCode/vitals-rs.git ../vitals-rs
git clone https://github.com/NicksLameCode/vitals-cosmic.git
cd vitals-cosmic

cargo build                           # Debug build
cargo build --release                 # LTO + stripped
cargo run -- COSMIC_PANEL_APPLET=1    # Dev loop (floating popup)

cargo fmt
cargo clippy -- -D warnings

Project layout

vitals-cosmic/
  Cargo.toml                      # Path-dep on ../vitals-rs/crates/vitals-core
  src/
    main.rs                       # cosmic::applet::run::<Vitals>
    app.rs                        # cosmic::Application: state, update,
                                  # subscription, popup action factory
    dbus.rs                       # zbus #[proxy] for com.corecoding.Vitals.Sensors
                                  # + Tokio background poll task
    config.rs                     # Thin wrapper around vitals_core::config::AppConfig
    format.rs                     # Wrapper around vitals_core::format::ValueFormatter
    model.rs                      # Reading / Category / Snapshot domain types
    icons.rs                      # Embedded SVG handles
    view/
      panel.rs                    # Panel chip row (button_custom + autosize)
      popup.rs                    # Category dropdown with star toggles
      graph.rs                    # Hover history summary (sparkline + stats)
      prefs.rs                    # Preferences sub-popup
  data/
    com.corecoding.VitalsCosmic.desktop
    icons/                        # 12 symbolic SVGs (copied from vitals-rs)
  gentoo/
    app-admin/vitals-cosmic/
      vitals-cosmic-0.1.0.ebuild
      metadata.xml
  scripts/
    record-demo.sh                # One-shot demo.gif recorder
                                  # (gpu-screen-recorder -> gifski)

Recording the demo gif

The README hero displays assets/demo.gif. To regenerate it, run:

scripts/record-demo.sh            # 12s default
scripts/record-demo.sh 8          # custom duration

Dependencies on Gentoo: sudo emerge --ask media-video/gpu-screen-recorder media-video/ffmpeg. The gpu-screen-recorder package lives in the guru overlay -- enable it with sudo eselect repository enable guru && sudo emaint sync -r guru if you haven't already. The script uses xdg-desktop-portal for region capture (works on COSMIC's Smithay compositor, unlike wlroots-only tools such as wf-recorder) and encodes the gif with a two-pass ffmpeg palette pipeline, so no gifski is needed.

Design notes

• Panel layout follows the cosmic-applet-time recipe: button::custom wrapped in widget::autosize::autosize(btn, AUTOSIZE_MAIN_ID) so cosmic-panel sizes the applet slot to fit the chip row instead of clipping to a fixed icon width.
• Symbolic icons are themed explicitly via Svg::Custom(|theme| ... theme.cosmic().background.on ...) to inherit the panel's foreground color, otherwise they render with the SVG's baked-in fill.
• Popup uses surface::action::app_popup::<Vitals>(settings, view) -- the current libcosmic popup API -- instead of the older platform_specific::shell::wayland::commands::popup::get_popup path used by some stock applets. Either works; this is the one documented in the current examples/applet/src/window.rs.
• Hover history race: a hover_generation counter on Vitals is bumped on every HoverEnter and checked when HistoryUpdated arrives, so a slow GetTimeSeries response for a previously hovered sensor never paints over the current one. Ported from vitals-rs commit 06d529b.

Credits

vitals-cosmic stands on the shoulders of:

• vitals-rs -- the Rust sensor library, daemon, GTK4 app, and GNOME Shell extension this applet shares a backend with.
• Vitals by corecoding -- the original GNOME Shell extension whose feature set and UX are the north star for every port.
• libcosmic by System76 -- the Rust/iced widget toolkit powering the COSMIC desktop.
• cosmic-applet-time -- reference implementation for a text-in-panel COSMIC applet that this port's panel layout is modeled after.

License

Licensed under the BSD-3-Clause License, matching vitals-rs.