Hello friendos! Today, in the early hours of the morning, I decided I’d write a little post.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been getting recommendations for this youtube video. Disclaimer: I still haven’t watched it, nor is it from a channel I know anything about. With that said though the video had a thumbnail of btop that caught my attention. (Kudos to the video creator for actually showing the program in the thumbnail.)

If you’re wondering what btop looks like in its freshly installed state then here you are!

---

htop dislikes

The reason it caught my attention was that, from a quick glance, it appeared to be a version of htop that had changed a few of the things I really did not like about it.

Those things were,

1. It gave a clearer break down of memory, htop’s memory display follows some strange color coding that isn’t explained anywhere that is immediately obvious. I think green means resident, yellow means cache. I don’t know what blue means and I’ve also seen red without any clue what that means either.

   

2. htop for some reason attempts to include the entire command used to invoke each running process. To me, the flags used to invoke each command are not useful in this situation. If I wanted those flags then I’m probably doing some piping between commands rather than looking at a monitoring tool.

   

3. htop doesn’t give much indication about cpu usage history. I think it is suppose to give some but I believe that’s apart of the color coding. Which, like memory’s color coding, isn’t explained anywhere obvious.

---

btop likes

In addition to correcting those issues there are a few other things I like about btop

1. btop includes network usage in it’s freshly installed form.
2. btop includes disk usage in its freshly installed form. (with a quick hotkey to switch to disk io instead.)

---

btop early pains

One thing I’ve noticed right away with btop is if you push numeric keys then you change the display. Additionally if you close btop and reopen it then the display stays in that changed state. Right away this is annoying to me because I use tmux and if I goof up my prefix key before switching to another window then I muck up my btop display.

---

Install

With all this in mind, I’ve decided to leave htop behind for now and give btop a try. If you’d like to do the same you can find it here: https://github.com/aristocratos/btop. I installed it using the most recent release package for my system and it came through without issue. Quickly,

---

I’ll note that at the time of writing this btop uses the Apache-2.0 License. Which in my opinion is extremely friendly and means this should be greenlit by legal teams the world over. :) Disclaimer: this is not legal advise nor does this imply the opinion of any of my past, present, or future employers or their legal team(s).