GeekTool!

Rainmeter is a desktop customization platform. Through Rainmeter, you can enhance your Windows computer at home or work with skins: handy, compact applets which float freely on your desktop, much like Windows Sidebar gagdgets, or dashboard widgets for the Mac. Rainmeter skins provide you with useful information at a glance. Its easy to keep an eye on your system resources, like memory and battery power, or your online data streams, including email, RSS feeds, and weather forecasts. Many skins are even functional: they can record your notes and to-do lists, launch your favorite applications, and send your tweets to Twitter - all in a clean, unobtrusive interface that you can rearrange and customize to your liking. »

Conky is a free, light-weight system monitor for X, that displays any kind of information on your desktop. Originally a fork of Torsmo, Conkys torsmo-based code is BSD licensed. New code in Conky has been licensed under the GPL 3.0.

This is a port to OS X El Capitan 10.11 of MenuMeters by Alex Harper.

XWidget is a free desktop customization platform. It’s light, handy with powerful visual widget editor and very subtle animations. The Android page is found here: http://android.xwidget.com/

The BitBar app lets you put the output from any script or program right in your Mac OS X menu bar. And it's completely free. An impressive number of plugins have already been contributed by a wide range of developers just like you, and this site makes it easy to find them.

Übersicht lets you run system commands and display their output on your desktop in little containers, called widgets. Widgets are written using HTML5, which means they

GKrellM is a single process stack of system monitors which supports applying themes to match its appearance to your window manager, Gtk, or any other theme.

MiniUsage displays various data like CPU usage, amount of network flow, battery status and process names which uses much CPU time in a menubar. It takes little space and can display various data, so it's suitable for notebook.

Monitor numerous OS X statistics including: CPU activity System load over time Network bandwidth and activity Memory activity and usage Battery & wireless signal strength Disk usage Current time and date Compact, clever & fully customizable user interface Presents information both graphically and with text Beautiful on Retina display Fits in perfectly with the new system appearances Save & load custom appearances Minimizes impact on system performance View data on the desktop, in the menu bar or Dock Show & hide windows using system hotkeys »

Nerdtool allows you to display many things directly on top of your desktop; weather reports, headline news, and system vitals are just a few uses.

This little application displays system information on your desktop in a similar way to some other desktop information tools. Unlike others, this application looks like wallpaper but stays resident in memory and continues to update the display in real time. Uses very little memory and nearly zero cpu. Perfect for quick identification and walk-by monitoring of production or test server farms. Everything is customisable including language.

XMeters taskbar system monitoring for Windows.

Cysboard - A lightweight system monitor similar to conky with html and css for themes