whatcable

"This is a Linux-native reimplementation inspired by darrylmorley/whatcable" https://github.com/nedrichards/whatcable-linux But (hazard guess) it comes with a headless CLI binary (no GUI libraries needed) so probably could be ported to Linux (easily with an LLM?) https://github.com/darrylmorley/whatcable

I cannot recommend enough https://github.com/darrylmorley/whatcable to know what power and data capabilities your cables support.

> https://github.com/darrylmorley/whatcable This was on show hn only yesterday. Probably can't tell you anything about the other end of the cable though. > Is this hard to do or just something normal people never care about? If i believed in conspiracies i'd say the usb consortium or mafia or whatever it's called is pressuring software developers to not display that info. Otherwise they'd have "normal people" with torches and pitchforks at their door.

Wontfix for Intel Macbooks: https://github.com/darrylmorley/whatcable/issues/12 Seems the Intel southbridge isn't known to expose the needed info.

Props to @sleepingNomad here, who has done 16 releases in the last 7 hours, incorporating feedback from HN on the fly! * Don't like menubar apps? you you can run it as a normal app * Don't like GUIs? Now you can run it on the command line Just look at that Changelog: https://github.com/darrylmorley/whatcable/releases?page=2

For some reason the app supports a separate standalone window mode as well [0]. It's not clear why the developer took the trouble to support two different modes when the menubar mode doesn't seem to add anything (like a live-updating icon for throughput). Well, I can think of one reason why it wasn't that much more trouble. François Chollet had a nice tweet [1] on why removing human cognitive friction is resulting in needless software complexity. [0] https://github.com/darrylmorley/whatcable/blob/main/Sources/... [1] https://x.com/fchollet/status/2045929951539707957

...And claude fixed it already https://github.com/darrylmorley/whatcable/commit/7a3ad1363ae...

There's an issue on Github for this now: https://github.com/darrylmorley/whatcable/issues/2

There's an issue on Github for this now: https://github.com/darrylmorley/whatcable/issues/2

USB-C cables can be a mess. One cable charges at 5W, another does 100W and Thunderbolt 4, and they look identical in the drawer. WhatCable sits in your menu bar and reads the cable data your Mac already has access to. Plug in a cable and it tells you in plain English what it can actually do: charging wattage, data speed, display support, Thunderbolt, etc. Built in Swift/SwiftUI. Open source, free, no tracking. GitHub: https://github.com/darrylmorley/whatcable