How to Show CPU, Memory and Free Disk Space in the Mac Menu Bar
macOS puts a lot in its menu bar — Wi-Fi, the battery, the clock — but nothing that tells you how busy the processor is, how much memory is in use or how much room is left on the disk. Activity Monitor knows all three, in a window you have to open and keep open. Here is the short answer, then the details.
- macOS alone: there is no menu bar item for these. Activity Monitor can turn its Dock icon into a live graph, and the Finder shows the free space at the bottom of its windows.
- With Folia Files: choose Folia Files › Settings… (⌘,), open Menu Bar, tick Free disk space, CPU and Memory under Contents, and pick one of four styles. The figures update every 2 seconds, and a click on them opens a small monitor.
What macOS offers without another app
Activity Monitor, in its window or in the Dock
Activity Monitor, in Applications › Utilities, has a tab for each: CPU, Memory, Energy, Disk and Network. The Memory tab ends with the memory pressure graph, the best sign that the Mac is really short of memory.
It can also replace its Dock icon with a live graph: choose View › Dock Icon, then the CPU, memory, disk or network graph. The graph only lives as long as Activity Monitor stays open, and it sits in the Dock, not in the menu bar.
Free disk space in the Finder and System Settings
- In a Finder window, View › Show Status Bar (⌘/) adds a line at the bottom with the number of items and the space available on that disk.
- System Settings › General › Storage shows how full the startup disk is and what fills it.
None of them stays in sight while you work in another app. That is what a menu bar item is for.
Add CPU, memory and free disk space to the menu bar with Folia Files
Folia Files puts an item in the menu bar from its first launch, but at first it only shows its icon. The measures are one setting away:
- Choose Folia Files › Settings… (⌘,), then Menu Bar in the list.
- Check that Show Folia Files in the menu bar is on. It is, unless you turned it off.
- Under Contents, tick Free disk space, CPU and Memory: all three, or only the one you care about. App icon adds Folia Files' icon in front of them; untick it to keep only the figures.
- Under Style, click one of the four cards. Each card draws its style with your Mac's current figures, and the Preview row below shows the chosen one on a light and on a dark menu bar.
The change applies at once. The measures always come in the same order — disk, then CPU, then memory — and the item keeps the same width whatever the figures, so the icons next to it don't shift every two seconds.
The four styles
- Minimal Rings: Folia's mark and one slim ring per measure, in the colors of your Folia theme. No figures, and the smallest footprint.
- Circular Gauges: one ring per measure with the percentage used in the middle — teal for the disk, blue for the CPU, purple for memory. For the disk, the number is the share already used, not what's free.
- Bars and Values: a symbol, a small upright gauge and the value: the free space in GB or TB, the CPU and memory in percent.
- Text: the symbol and the value, nothing else.
In the ring and bar styles, a measure that reaches 90 % turns orange to red: on the disk, that means less than a tenth of it is left. Hover over the item to read the exact figures in a tooltip; VoiceOver reads them too. And while Folia Files copies or moves files, the transfer's progress is added in front, with two arrows.
What the three figures measure
- CPU is the whole Mac: 100 % means every core is busy. Activity Monitor's per-app figures count one core as 100 %, so they can go well beyond that.
- Memory is the share of RAM in use. A high figure on its own isn't a problem: macOS puts memory to work rather than leaving it empty. If the Mac feels slow, look at the memory pressure instead (below).
- Free disk space is the startup disk's, counted like the Finder's "available" figure, which includes space macOS can free on its own. It is read every 30 seconds rather than every 2, since it barely moves. When it runs low, see which folders take the most space.
The menu bar item has its own section on the drawer and menu bar page.
One click for the rest: the monitor in its menu
Click the item. Its menu opens on a small live monitor: CPU, memory and free disk space as gauges with their values, the network's download and upload speeds, the battery level on a laptop, and the size of the Trash — click it to empty the Trash, after a confirmation. The monitor refreshes every second and a half while the menu is open.
Below it: Mac Care…, the transfers in progress, the clipboard history, your favorites and recent folders, your connections, the volumes with a command to eject them, and Keep the Mac Awake, handy during a long copy (how that works).
More detail: the Activity module
When three figures aren't enough, the Activity module shows the whole picture inside the Folia Files window. Add it to the right sidebar (View › Show Right Sidebar, ⌥⌘E, then the sidebar's Modules button), under the list of the left sidebar, or as a pane of its own: drag New Pane to an edge of the window and pick Activity in its grid, or choose View › New Pane on the Right… (⌥⌘\).
It shows:
- CPU: the total, the share taken by the system, a curve of the last minute and a bar per core;
- Memory: used out of total, split into apps, wired and compressed memory, the Pressure curve (green, yellow or red) and the swap in use, if any;
- Network and Disks: what is received or read above the line, what is sent or written below;
- Graphics, when the graphics processor reports its load, and Energy: the battery and its time left on a laptop, the Mac's temperature state and Low Power Mode;
- Busiest: the three processes using the most CPU, counted per core as in Activity Monitor. This list is in the website edition only: the Mac App Store edition can't see other apps' processes.
The module's gear sets the pace (Measure: Every Second, Every 2 Seconds or Every 5 Seconds), hides the parts you don't need (Show) and has Open Activity Monitor for the per-process tables. Every module is on the modules page.
Keep the meters without keeping a window open
The menu bar item lives as long as Folia Files runs. In Settings › General:
- turn on Open Folia Files at login and Start in the background (no window): the item is back after each restart, and no window opens;
- untick Show icon in the Dock if the menu bar is all you want: Folia Files leaves the Dock and the ⌘⇥ switcher, and its menu bar item can no longer be hidden, since it becomes the way back in.
It stays light: the menu bar figures are read every 2 seconds, and not at all while the displays are off; the Activity module only measures while it is on screen.
On a MacBook with a notch, a crowded menu bar hides the items that don't fit, without a word. If the item is missing, quit an app you don't need in the menu bar, or choose Minimal Rings or Circular Gauges, the narrowest styles. Hold ⌘ and drag an item to move it along the menu bar.
