My 2009 27″ iMac is starting to show its age. So when its hard drive started crunching this morning (and bringing the machine to a crawl), I wanted to know a little more. The command-line utility fs_usage is good if there’s not much going on, but if there’s a lot, the information flies by far too quickly to get good sense of what’s going on.

fseventer — donation-ware by Robert Pointon of fernLighting — is a great way to figure out what’s going on. It provides the interesting information from fs_usage, but it does so in a fun, visual, animated way. Highly recommended.

This set of instructions for turning on syntax highlighting in vi (vim, in fact) worked like a charm.