If you have any questions let me know in the comment section. FeedbackĪs you can see htop is an easy to use process viewer. A fundraiser is going on to help development. Mac supportĮven though htop was designed for Linux, the team is working on a port for the Mac, since the current version is 5 years old. The htop config file is stored under ~/.config/htop. This means that htop uses environment variables such as XDG_DATA_HOME enviromment variables for user configuration. Since version 1.0.2 htop is XDG compatible. The /proc filesystem exposes a view of information that lives in the kernel so application programs can consume it or in some cases alter it via sysctl.

Htop uses the Linux /proc filesystem to gather information about all processes running on a Linux host. Here is a screenshot of the things I customized: Hit F2 for ‘Setup’ and you can configure display options as well as the columnns it should show. Htop can be customized so it displays the information you want.

Strace: Navigate to a process and press ‘s’.

Send signal: Press ‘k’, select a signal number and hit enter.

Sorting: Press F6 ‘Sort By’ and then you can for example select on Percent memory or Percent CPU.

Filter by keyword: Press F3, add a term and hit enter.

Filter by user: Press ‘u’, select a user name and hit enter.

Filteringīelow are a few useful ways to filter processes:

Also, you can use the mouse to select processes or menu items. One great feature is that you can scroll horizontally to the right to view the entire command line of every process. $ sudo apt-get install automake libtool libncurses5-dev Note that you might have to install automake, libtool as well as libncurses5-dev, since htop is an ncurses application. My Ubuntu 14.4 system still uses htop 1.0.2-3 and several bugs have been fixed in 1.0.3 so let’s use the latest version.

Htop may not be installed on your system by default so you can install it with apt:Īlternatively, you can download and build the 1.0.3 version from the htop Github repo.

Getting Started with Htop Install with Apt… Among other features it provides full horizontal and vertical scrolling, searching and filtering. In the words of Htop’s author Hisham Muhammad, it aims to be a better alternative to the top program. In this short blog I will introduce you to a useful tool called Htop, a process viewer for Linux, which is also available for Mac.

Linux htop command