is there any way to to see everything connected via USB?

[wfriedwald]

using an M1 laptop
Dell UD 22 dock
2 big USB3 hubs with 12 ports each (going into the dock)
many hard drives & USB devices etc

is there any app or setting that allows me to see everything that's connected to the MacBook?

Disk Utility does this with the hard drives (volumes), internal and external, but I'm looking for something that shows other devices, microphones, cameras, even my livescribe Echo Smart pen (especially that) -

it's so complicated that I could use some kind of method of seeing exactly what's connected, and how.

grateful for any feedback / suggestions.

Thanks!

w

 

[iStorm]

System Report can do this (System Settings -> General -> System Report). Select 'USB' in the left pane.

 

[organicCPU]

Try this in Terminal app:

system_profiler SPUSBDataType

 

[wfriedwald]

thank you both for the input. I'm also wondering if there's a third party app that might lay everything out in a way that's more visually coherent - it's hard to see what's what when there's just text. But still this is very useful!

w

 

[organicCPU]

I´m not aware of such an app and I´m not sure, what exactly you want to achieve.

You can try xbar with a plugin for USB device details or write your own plugin that fits your needs.
Then there is swiftGuard that is a security tool and keeps unknown USB devices away, but it has an USB monitoring feature. I didn't try any of those two suggestions, so maybe you can share your experiences here.

If just the amount of info of the system_profiler command is too much, you could grep for the pieces of information that you really need. You could modify the following example to your requirements:

system_profiler SPUSBDataType | grep '\:$' | cut -d : -f 1

Maybe you can turn the system_profiler command into a plugin for xbar that does what you want.