Fivebars
Fivebars app icon

One glance.
Five bars.

Fivebars puts your internet connection in the Mac menu bar: five signal bars and your latest ping time, updated every second. All five bars means fast and steady. Fewer means slow or lost pings.

A native Mac app, about 4 MB to download. No account, no tracking. It pings one host you choose and checks for updates once a day.

Download
  • macOS 14 or later
  • Apple silicon
  • No root, no helper
Menu bar item: five bars and 13msLatest Ping Time: 13ms Recent Packet Loss: 0%
The Fivebars menu: five green bars, Excellent, host 1.1.1.1, the latest ping time and packet loss, five minutes of ping times as green bars with a few orange slow ones, statistics for this session and all time, then Reset Session Stats, Check for Updates, Settings, About and Quit
Real captures from the app. Click the bars to open this menu; hover them for a quick readout.
Pings every
1 s
Bars cover
30 s
Default host
1.1.1.1
Slow above
100 ms
Lost after
4 s
Failed after
8 s

Read it like your phone.

More bars, better connection. Fivebars scores each ping from the last 30 seconds, counts the newest ones most, and turns the result into bars. One lost ping costs you a bar for a few seconds; a dead line shows a warning triangle.

  1. ExcellentFast replies, nothing missing.
  2. GoodA slow or lost ping or two lately.
  3. FairOften slow, or dropping pings.
  4. PoorMostly slow, or losing pings regularly.
  5. Very poorBarely getting through.
  6. FailedNo reply for 8 seconds. It keeps retrying, and the menu says why.

Thirty pings.
One groove.

Here are the last 30 pings as a drum machine, oldest first. Click a key to make that ping fast, slow, crawling or lost, and the screen shows the bars Fivebars would draw. Drag the slow ping slider to see how much your threshold forgives. Then press play and listen to your connection.

Fivebars PS-30

Excellent

5 bars · score 1.00 · loss 0%

The rules, in full

  1. At or under the slow ping threshold: a perfect 1.
  2. Slower: falls in a straight line to 0 at threshold + 900 ms, then on down to −2.5.
  3. No reply within 4 s: lost, −2.5.
  4. Newer counts more: each step weighs 1.2× the one before it, so a tunnel two seconds ago hurts and one from 25 seconds ago barely registers.

bars = min(floor(clamp(score, 0, 1) × 5), 4) + 1

Play groove turns your pattern into six bars of 5/4 in D minor at 120 BPM: five beats a bar, like the five bars in your menu bar, with the accents grouped three plus two. One step per beat is 2× faster than the real thing, which pings once a second. Each step plays by its score under your slow ping threshold, so moving the slider changes the groove: steps at or under it keep a tight groove, slower ones swing and soften the further they fall, ones that score 0 or less drag and go out of tune, lost ones drop out into vinyl crackle. The window score sets the filter: a good connection sounds bright, a bad one sounds muffled. Nothing plays until you press it.

No dashboard to read.

Plenty of network monitors give you graph windows with five time ranges, a list of targets and a jitter chart. They are good at proving an outage after the fact.

Fivebars answers one question while you work: is my connection good right now? You can read the bars from across the room. The numbers are one click away when you want them.

Inside

The menu: quality word, host, latest ping, a five-minute ping chart with the slow ping threshold marked, session and all-time statistics, and rows for Reset Session Stats, Check for Updates, Settings, About and Quit

The menu

Click the bars, left or right, for the details: the quality word, the host and its address, the last five minutes of ping times with your slow ping threshold dashed in and lost pings in red, and statistics for this session and all time.

The Fivebars Settings window: host to ping set to 1.1.1.1, ping every 1 second with a stepper, slow ping threshold slider at 100 ms, display set to Icon and Text, packet loss text set to When There’s Loss, switches for connection alerts and launch at login, and the update settings

Settings

Pick the host to ping, how often (every 1 to 60 seconds) and how slow counts as slow (50 to 2000 ms). Show bars, ping time or both, packet loss always or only while pings are lost, and turn on connection alerts and launch at login. Choose Settings in the menu to get here.

Menu bar item: a warning triangle and Failed The menu when the connection is down: grey bars, Connection down, Can’t find host nas.invalid, a red Down where the ping time usually is, and a Change Host row above the usual ones

When it’s down

The bars turn into a warning triangle and Failed. Open the menu to see why, here a host that doesn’t exist, and fix it with Change Host.