Install and use a non-GUI connection speed test tool
Yesterday on Twitter, Dave Hamilton tweeted…
`brew install speedtest` is one of the best things I ever did on my Macs. `speedtest` from Terminal rocks. No flash, no browser. W00t!
— Dave Hamilton (@DaveHamilton) March 13, 2017
What is this speedtest exactly? And what is brew, you may also be wondering? You may also be wondering why, if you have brew, Dave's command doesn't work…that's because it's actually brew install speedtest_cli…but I'm getting ahead of myself.
speedtest is a command line interface (i.e. Unix app run from Terminal) to the connection speed tests at Speedtest.net—you get the results without the fancy animated graphics. And Brew is "the missing package manager for macOS." In other words, it's an app to help you install (and uninstall) other apps.
Here's how speedtest looks in its default mode—note that I've sped things up greatly for the GIF…
Much nicer to me, though, is the simplified version:
$ speedtest_cli --simple Ping: 9.482 ms Download: 94.23 Mbit/s Upload: 68.66 Mbit/s
No animated dots, just three lines with the results. As you might expect if you read here regularly, I also wrote a Keyboard Maestro macro (of course I did!) that makes it really easy to run the simple version of the test, and does some editing of the output to simplify the display:
If you'd like to install speedtest (and maybe add the macro)—even if you don't want to install Brew to do so—keep reading…