Linux @lemmy.ml

1y ago

I'm ditching htop for btop, look how cool it is

141 comments

I made the swich a year or two ago. It is much better I find. I leave it running in a tmux session on my server . with btop on one pane and switch to another with a split view to do work. It allows me to take a quick glance at any time while not taking the focus from what I was working on.
- Don't understand why someone should downvote you, take my upvote instead
  
  Might be missclick. Some people have fat fingers.
  
  Lol no idea, some people just want to watch the world burn I suppose. Thanks kind stranger. Wishing you and yours the best.

Bottom for life (or at least until something with more stats comes out)
- Just found this too, through the rust post some days ago...but its quite obvious that from a usability context that btop is easier to use. With bottom you have to memorize all hotkeys wheres btop is showing them right in the interface.
  
  Yea. I was using bottom until I saw this and did a quick side-by-side comparison (nix-shell -p btop, I use NixOS BTW). btop's UI is just so much better.
- I’m really loving bottom
  
  Switch is that perfect sweet spot right in the middle. Very versatile.
- The graphs look way better than btop.
  
  I agree here, although I have no clue why it looks so different.
- @StaticRocket @zShxck for a second there I thought he was revealing his favored sexual positions
- it's actually really pretty
- Bro literally every second software is written in rust nowadays 😭
  
  it's a good language

Ooh, it looks even better than gtop.
Edit: Why does the menu look like this?
- 50/50 on if it starts listing processes or launches a new game of Zelda.
  
  Say no more, I'm sold
- Btop has been rewritten in C++, hence the ++
  
  Uh oh, time to rewrite it in rust
- Jeez, never saw that, mine just open the program
  
  Press 'm'
- Nostalgia city...

That basically looks like every hollywood movie in existence
- hollywood is an installable app which when run takes over your machine with a fullscreen terminal and multiple panels with lots of dyanamic data to look like a hacking scene from a Hollywood film. :)
  You can exit it with Ctrl+C
  
  Thank you for this, I installed it yesterday and it brought me immeasurable joy for a few minutes :D
- I use btop, iotop, jnettop, and radeontop. I rarely need any individual piece of information any of them but they make for an incredible spread of blinkenlights.
  
  You can use nvtop for monitoring your GPU, not as detailed as radeontop though but looks good
- Nope, for that use this one, which is also in Debian-based distros and Docker
- Clearly OP Is hacking the Matrix.

Pro tip: configure a font that doesn't show open circles for unused braille characters to have a higher priority than your current font to get better-looking graphs.
On my system, braille characters are provided by DejaVu Serif, and it was as easy as just installing the font.
- Where do you see open circles? I don't understand sorry
  
  I think they mean the variable width of the graph's columns. If you watch it as the graph moves, there are gaps at every 2 columns.
  I don't understand though the thing about font priorities.
  And also, would that just change all fonts? Unless you mod the font to only have the braille characters..
  
  No, you've got it set up right. Many people will have graphs where each character rectangle has open circles for the unused braile dots in the character block.
  Here's an example.
- Stop has a block mode, I just use that. Stop is so fancy I love it

I tried btop. It slowed my computer way the fuck down, so I went back to htop
- Maybe you used bpytop, not btop? They look the same iirc.
  
  Oh, you might actually be right there... I'm not sure now I didn't realize there were alternatives.
  I remember trying it a while back when I found a list of fancy looking terminal apps. It was fancy, but it came at the cost of performance.
- really? I've never had much issues
  
  My laptop went bonkers trying to run it, maybe I have something misconfigured somewhere. I wanted to like it because it looks great, but I couldn't because it was seemingly too resource intensive.
- yeah you need a decently fast hw accelerated terminal for it
  for example, the gnome terminal is pretty slow; if you're using it, try running it in alacrity or kitty and see if that improves performance.
  
  I'll have to check it out. I've seen kitty mentioned a few times but I'm an oldschool xterm kinda guy lol

Does noone use glances anymore?
- I do as well. I really appreciate the information density, key bindings, and optional web UI. Although I found if I leave glance is running for a prolonged amount of time, it has a tendency to crash from some python issue I haven't dissected yet, as it takes so much time to reproduce.
- I do.
- Hey, just so you know, "no one" is two words.

Yeah, that looks very cool. Wish I could use it as my wallpaper or a widget in gnome
- Open btop in the terminal, then (note the terminal window must not be in fullscreen) right click with the mouse on the top bar of the terminal window and select "Always on top".

One I started using Bpytop, I couldn't go back.
- It's written in Python.
  EDIT: My original comment refers to going to Bpytop from just plain top. I believe btop is a C++ rewrite of bpytop.
- @JoMiran @zShxck That is very nice. I love the way you can toggle between disk space usage and disk I/O usage. Here is a btop of the machine that friendica.eskimo.com is running on:

Nice, I've tried gtop and atop before and they were pretty nice, but I usually fall back to htop because old habits die hard. I'll give this a go!

Meanwhile, every system (even Android) has good ol' top. It works.
- It can't even kill processes.
  
  That's what kill is for ...

I used for a bit, I even configured it to open in a separate monitor when booting, it was cool for a while
- I used for a bit...
  What changed?
  
  It was cool but really I didn't need to watch all that information

btop doesn't update all of the characters for me after a while if I leave it open for a long time, and eventually it stops updating altogether.

Hi Guiseppe

Can it show each core's frequency? Or is there anything other than htop that can do that?
- It does
  
  I don't see any option in 1.2.13, and https://github.com/aristocratos/btop/issues/190 suggests it isn't implemented yet.

I ditched all top programs on my system, because I have no use for any of them....
- How do you check what is eating up all your memory/cpu?
  
  Just download more, simple.
  
  My computer just works so I've never needed to check, but I run XFCE & have xfce4-taskmanager installed, so I could use that if I ever needed....
  
  @berg @furycd001
  To get a comprehensive overview of your system's resource usage, install and run the btop command. It's a top-like interactive system monitor that displays a range of system information, including:
  CPU usage (per core and overall)
  RAM usage (free, used, and cached)
  Disk usage (per disk and overall)
  Network usage (bytes sent and received)
  Process list (with CPU, RAM, and disk usage per process)
  System temperature
  Uptime
- There's a top surgery joke in here somewhere, I can feel it.
- I only use htop to kill process when it froze.
  
  I just use xkill for that....

I just wish there was a .deb package.
Still gonna get around to making a playbook for installing it someday. btop (and it’s predecessors) are awesome.
- There's a deb in Ubuntu Universe.
  Oh heck, it's in Debian Bookworm too, and Bullseye-Backports.
  Debs all around.
  
  I could have sworn I checked and didn’t find it. I’ll look again, maybe I did something wrong

This looks great! Thanks for the recommendation.
I like Netdata because it's web based, has a large number of metrics, you can pan/zoom the graphs, and it doesn't use much CPU power. Console UIs are nice but they're more limiting than something web-based.
- Perhaps someone can implement something w3mimage or sixels in btop for pannable graphs. Don't know how efficient that is.

I'm using lcdproc on a 20x4 characters display, it's enough to see cpu, load, mem, Network, etc
- Show us

has more empty space. Can the user change that?
- You can collapse the subwindows and configure the graphs
  
  Oh, good.

bottom users rise up. RIIR!

The nord theme on btop is blissful. It looks so good.

@zShxck
It's very attractive, but it also seems to have a minimum window size requirement that exceeds the "stack" in my "master and stack."
It's great to use if you need a dashboard to track issues, but for a quick look at running processes, I think I'll stick with htop.

Purely on aesthetics, I find bashtop nicer, but I couldn't get it on my server.
I often use glances for general monitoring.

ps -aux | grep yourmom
- Get in the robot Shinji

why ? Why do you feel the need to have process monitoring displayed all the time?
- It's a tool. It's useful to figure out if something you're running is IO-bound or CPU-bound. It also shows per-core load, which is useful for visualizing multi-threaded performance.
- You can sort and filter it.
  More generally, are you questioning why the Top category of tools exists?
  
  no, I am questioning why do you have those open all the time. in 17y, I never had to. This is just ASCII pr0n to look "deep" .
- If you press P you can get rid of them

Both are useless toys for newbie sysadmins who think their job is sitting and looking at list of processes.
- Nice gatekeeping.
- Teach me how to know which process is hogging my memory or CPU, in less than 5 steps without htop?
  
  Launch top? Quick glance, type 'q', then kill
  
  do you experience that often ? anyway, the plain, basic 'top' command can provide it to you. There's literally a column %CPU and %MEM
- I mean, you do sometimes need to check out which processes are running to debug
  
  Aren't top or pgrep enough for that?
- I use it to find a process quickly and send a SIGTERM. I'm probably a noob though.
  
  Why not top? pkill? killall? These tools are usually installed by default.
- It is, for them.
- It's not even about sysadmins, it's just hacker wannabe. tomorrow they will say "coz I waNt to maSter mo sYstem".
  yep good luck in auditing the 1.5k packages installed on your system.
  
  Cringe take. I'ts just a fun pretty system monitor tool. I work as a senior cloud architect. I have 10 years of pretty heavy professional and home Linux usage and I just installed it on my home server because I have a unused 1/3 on one of my monitors at home where it can just live forever inside tmux.
  It's fun to see Plex take more resources because someone started a stream, or see the different parts of kubernetes working when I start a few containers. I have also added a drive to my btrfs raid so I was interested in seeing what kinda load the re balance did on the system over time. Turns out not much. It's a fun tool.
  I use different tools on the several Azure environments I am part of maintaining lol.

141 comments