forget top, check out htop

By | 2007/07/15

I just realized I’ve never blogged about a really cool tool that I’m sure you’ll be impressed with.  If you’ve used top, or use top to ever try to get an idea of what is running on your machine you’ll really like htop.

From the package description:

Htop is an ncurses-based process viewer similar to top, but it allows to scroll the list vertically and horizontally to see all processes and their full command lines.  Tasks related to proccesses (killing, renicing) can be done without entering their PIDs.

Yeah, that’s right.  You can actually see the whole process including options and arguments.  You can scroll down off the current page to see what else is running.  It also looks a lot prettier, and I know how much you like your pretty applications.

Installation

Installing htop is as easy as you might guess:

sudo aptitude install htop

That’s it.  Then run htop and get a better view of what is running on your machine.  I would add a section here on how to use it, but its so simple I don’t think I need to.  All the shortcut keys are listed at the bottom.

Tomorrow I’ll show you how to bypass the F10 limitation when used with gnome-terminal.  ..you’ll see what I mean when you try to use it. 🙂

12 thoughts on “forget top, check out htop

  1. jdong

    “Tomorrow I’ll show you how to bypass the F10 limitation when used with gnome-terminal. ..you’ll see what I mean when you try to use it.”

    L.O.L.

  2. Pingback: University Update - Linux - forget top, check out htop

  3. joe sleeper

    That’s a great program! Funny how there are a ton of utilities I (and many others) have never heard of.

    Your last comment about the F10 key made me think it was unrelated, until I was in the program then went to exit 🙂

  4. Jason

    Great tip. Never heard of htop before.

    BTW, F10 worked fine for me. I wonder why? What is F10 supposed to do in gnome-terminal?

  5. RainCT

    Or Ctrl + C 🙂

    Nice program, didn’t know neither of top nor of this one.

  6. Jeff Schroeder

    Another nice little app you might blog about is dstat. Dstat is like vmstat + iostat + a bit of sar all rolled into one. Very nice with colored output.

    And it is apt-get installable.

  7. Lane

    Very nice, and F10 works fine in Kubuntu. I was also glad to see that apt created a KDE menu entry.

  8. Scott Severance

    Who needs F10? The standard top keys work in htop (at least the ones I’ve tried so far): q for quit, u to filter by user, k to kill, etc. Far superior to F-keys, IMO.

  9. MacTips

    Thats a great little program. I was looking for something like this all along. Thanks

  10. rusty

    i have never used any program like this, how does it work? how do you command? and what are important commands?
    Thank you

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