mping 🌐

mping is a friendly, terminal‑based ping monitor built with Go. It features a sleek text UI powered by Bubble Tea and Lipgloss. Use it to watch multiple hosts in real time, spot outages instantly and keep your host list tidy.

✨ Highlights

• 🗃️ Loads hosts from a file: On startup mping reads a hosts.txt file where each line has the format host,description.
• 🔁 Adjustable ping interval: Hosts are polled on a timer from 0.5 s up to 5 s. Change the interval at runtime via the options dialog.
• ✅ Colour‑coded status: Green for reachable hosts, red for unreachable ones. A bell sound and a brief highlight draw your attention when a host changes status.
• 📏 Latency & ageing info: See reply time in milliseconds along with when the status last changed and how long ago that was.
• ✍️ Edit your host list live: Add, edit or remove entries directly in the UI. Saved changes persist to hosts.txt.
• ↕️ Sortable & scrollable: Sort by name, IP, status, reply time or age. Large lists scroll smoothly; the ASCII header and shortcut legend stay pinned at the top.

🎛️ Controls

Key	Action
A	Add a new host
E	Edit the selected host
D	Delete the selected host
S	Save changes to hosts.txt
R	Reload hosts from hosts.txt
O	Options: set interval & sort order
Q	Quit mping

In dialogs, use Tab to cycle between input fields and Esc to cancel.

🛠️ Building mping

1. Install Go ≥ 1.22 if you haven’t already. Get it from https://golang.org/dl/ or via your package manager.

2. Clone this repository and enter it:

   git clone https://github.com/your‑username/mping.git
   cd mping
   

3. Download dependencies using go mod tidy:

   go mod tidy
   

4. Compile the binary:

   go build -o mping
   

   To cross‑compile for Linux on another platform, set the appropriate GOOS and GOARCH, e.g.:

   GOOS=linux GOARCH=amd64 go build -o mping
   

5. Prepare your host list: Create a hosts.txt file with one host per line, separated by a comma and a short description:

   127.0.0.1,Localhost
   google.com,Google
   

6. Run mping:

   ./mping
   

🍺 Installation via Homebrew

If you use Homebrew on macOS or Linux, you can install mping directly from our tap instead of building it yourself. First add the tap, then install:

brew tap teddyfluffkins/homebrew-tap
brew install mping-tui

Homebrew will download the latest release binary and link it into your $PATH. If a new version is published, you can upgrade via brew upgrade mping.

🧑‍💻 How it works

mping keeps a list of hosts in memory and periodically spawns lightweight ping commands to check their reachability. It parses the response time and updates the table on the fly. The TUI is based on the Elm architecture: a model holds all state, an update function reacts to messages (like key presses or new ping results), and a view function renders the interface. Bubble Tea’s message system drives the periodic pings and lets the UI stay responsive.

⚠️ Permissions

On some systems (macOS in particular) unprivileged users aren’t allowed to run ping. Make sure your user has the necessary rights. On most Linux distributions, the ping binary has the setuid bit enabled, so you can run it without sudo.

📄 License

This project is released under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for full details.