A small red lamp in your menu bar, brightening when your disk is working. The ambient HDD-activity LED of pre-2010 personal computers, restored as software.
- Live disk activity. A circular red LED in the menu bar that brightens with disk read/write throughput. Adaptive sampling: 30 Hz when there's I/O, 5 Hz when your Mac is at rest.
- Memory pressure. A slim amber bar next to the LED fills with swap depth relative to your RAM. Warms toward orange when your Mac is leaning on the swap file.
- At-a-glance numbers. Click the LED for read/write totals (this session and since last reboot), RAM in use, swap on disk, and the kernel's pressure level. Same metrics Activity Monitor shows, one click away from anywhere.
Download the signed DMG from the latest release. Drag Blinken.app to /Applications. Launch.
Requires macOS 15 (Sequoia) or later, on Apple Silicon or Intel.
Click the LED → Preferences. Pick the LED color, the swap-bar color, your glow intensity, and toggle Launch at Login. Reset to defaults at any time.
Blinken is local-only. It reads system disk counters via IOKit and memory stats via standard macOS APIs. No accounts, no telemetry, no servers, no data ever leaves your machine.
Full policy: labs.axiomic.ai/blinken/privacy.
brew install xcodegen
git clone https://github.com/marchoag/blinken.git
cd blinken
xcodegen generate
open Blinken.xcodeproj⌘B to build, ⌘R to run. Requires Xcode 26+ and macOS 15+.
To cut a signed, notarized DMG yourself, see scripts/release.sh (one-time setup documented in the script header).
MIT. Use it however you like; just keep the copyright notice.
Made with ❤️ in Marin County, California by Marc Hoag. © 2026 Axiomic, LLC.