I received many comments and emails about my recent article on How to check memory usage on your Mac and the iStat Pro Dashboard widget I installed and demonstrated in that article’s video. Many readers installed that widget and liked having more insight into their Mac’s memory usage, but some found the variety of system information displayed in iStat Pro to be a bit overwhelming. Never fear–iStat Pro is highly customizable. Watch this video to see all the ways to adapt the widget to your needs.
Like most Dashboard widgets, iStat Pro’s settings are reached by clicking on the little “i” button, found in its upper left corner. Its settings are divided into three tabs: General, Sections, Display.
The General tab controls high level settings like temperature units and “skin type” (whether iStat Pro is tall or wide).
The Sections tab controls which of the 9 sections (CPU, memory, hard drive(s), battery, network, load & uptime, processes, temps, fans) are displayed. It also lets you choose between a couple options for the CPU and memory sections.
The Display tab lets you filter some of the sections. You can pick which disks, networks, temps, and fans are displayed, and also if widgets are excluded from the processes section.
All in all, iStat Pro gives you great control over what system information you see and what you can hide. If you want to see everything, you can. But if you want to only show system memory details, you can do that too.