Visualize Your Pings in Real Time with gping

If you’ve ever found yourself running ping in a terminal, watching those milliseconds fly by in a wall of repetitive text, you’ll appreciate what comes next. What if you could see that network latency—live—as a beautiful, scrolling graph? Enter gping.

It’s a small but mighty command-line tool that does exactly what it says: “Ping, but with a graph.” It turns a basic networking utility into a visual diagnostic experience, and it’s every bit as useful as it is satisfying to watch.

What It Does

gping is a Rust-based tool that takes the classic ping command and overlays a real-time terminal graph of the response times. You can ping a single host, compare multiple hosts side-by-side, or even graph the execution time of shell commands. It works seamlessly across Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Why It’s Cool

The magic of gping isn't just in the visual feedback—though watching the graph spike when your connection hiccups is instantly informative. It’s also in the clever extras the developer packed in:

• Multi-Host Graphing: Track several hosts or IPs simultaneously, each with a colored line, to compare latency across different services or regions.
• Command Timing: Use the --cmd flag to time how long commands take to run, not just network requests. Great for spotting performance trends in scripts or builds.
• Cloud Region Shorthands: Ping AWS regions directly with shorthand like aws:eu-west-1.
• It’s Just Simple: The default behavior is exactly what you expect: gping google.com. No heavy GUI, no complicated setup—just a graph in your terminal.

It’s one of those tools that feels obvious in hindsight. You didn’t know you needed it until you try it, and then it quickly becomes a staple.

How to Try It

Installation is straightforward no matter your platform. The easiest ways:

• macOS: brew install gping
• Linux: Available via Homebrew, or check the repo for distro-specific installs like pacman -S gping on Arch or apt install gping on newer Debian/Ubuntu.
• Windows: scoop install gping or choco install gping
• With Cargo: If you have Rust installed, cargo install gping works too.

Once it’s installed, just run:

gping github.com

Or compare two hosts:

gping google.com cloudflare.com

You can even time a command:

gping --cmd curl -s https://example.com/ > /dev/null

Final Thoughts

gping is a perfect example of a developer tool that does one thing and does it exceptionally well. It doesn’t try to replace advanced network monitoring systems, but it absolutely makes your day-to-day debugging and exploration more intuitive. The next time you’re troubleshooting a flaky connection or just want to see what your network looks like under the hood, gping is your new best friend.

Check out the project on GitHub to see more options, contribute, or just give it a star:
https://github.com/orf/gping

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