Linux @lemmy.ml DrillingStricken @programming.dev 8mo ago

Which one do you prefer? htop, btop or top?

Why do you find yourself opting for btop or htop instead of top? What advantages do these tools offer that make them superior to top in your opinion?

top has served me well, so I'm unsure why I would want to burden my system with the addition of htop or btop. With top, if you wish to terminate a process, simply press 'k' and send the signal; it's that simple. If you'd like to identify the origin of a process, just include the command column.

I often find myself intrigued when encountering comments on posts expressing love for htop/btop. To me, it appears unnecessary or BLOATED!! Please do share your perspectives and help broaden my Linux knowledgebase.

77 comments

htop because it's much more user-friendly than top, has the feature of sending all kinds of signals to processes, has mouse support and it generally looks good. Not a fan of btop at all. Idk how to use it and I don't like the UI. I personally love the idea of no bloat. It's just such a nice little philosophy. Sometimes I even want to use a CLI only computer tbh. Though htop weights only a few kilobytes and it has features top doesn't have so I don't consider it bloat. I had it on my server as well
- Yeah, I can understand RAM use in htop, but not in top
  
  Also, the Tree View makes it easy to see which part of <insert name of application> has become a zombie, etc.
- To be honest, I really prefer btop's sleek UI. It looks so modern and advanced. But with all its beauty and abundance of information, it can be overwhelming at times or in another words, bloattt. That's why I personally lean towards htop's text-based interface, which I find highly customizable to my preferences. Plus, htop offers more features and conveniences than top, making it my go-to choice for now.
https://github.com/ClementTsang/bottom
bottom
- Bottom gang unite
  
  Yeah, +1 for bottom. Love myself a nice ASCII graph
- Up top
Btop
It's no burden. Don't overthink it. Use whatever you like.
- Totally, but I do want to know about other people experience tho. So if you don't mind, share with me my friend.
  
  btop is not only beautiful but contains more info more dense more compact.
btop for bling

htop for practical utility

top for minimalism, availability, reliability
htop on our vms and clusters, because it's in all the repos, it's fast, it's configurable by a deployable config file, it's very clearly laid out and it does everything I need. I definitely would not call it bloated in any way.

My config includes network and i/o traffic stats, and details cpu load type - this in particular makes iowait very easy to spot when finding out why something's racking up big sysloads. Plus, it looks very impressive on a machine with 80 cores...

My brain can't parse top's output very well for anything other than looking for the highest cpu process.

But - ymmv. Everyone has a preference and we have lots of choice, it doesn't make one thing better or worse than another.
htop gives me enough info without being too busy or slow, it's also in basically every OS repo by default so no complicated install.

The other ones can look awesome, but they're often harder to get info from quickly due to being too cluttered.
I like htop because it has nice CPU graphs and a good tui for navigating. Top is a bit too obtuse for a new user, especially since CPU time is measured per core and not per the entire CPU. Plus I never figured out how turbo boost plays a roll in those percents.

I haven’t gotten around to messing with btop, but it seems like more of what I like.

Also fuck the “muh bloat” people. I have an i9 and 32 gigs of ram. I don’t care that a monitor util takes 1/10th of a second longer to launch and uses 1MB more of ram.
- Also fuck the “muh bloat” people. I have an i9 and 32 gigs of ram. I don’t care that a monitor util takes 1/10th of a second longer to launch and uses 1MB more of ram.
  
  Maybe you only use those tools on your desktop but on a cloud server with only 1-2GB of RAM you really don't want your monitoring to take up some significant percentage of that. Especially when you are debugging things like OOM conditions already.
  
  If I was that memory- and cpu-constrained I would be using other tools such as memstat, iostat, and cpustat.
  
  Why are you using top instead of ps if you're worried about memory?
  
  Containerise it, and you can debug locally
  
  It's not what the person you're replying to is talking about. You're using a slightly better tool for a specific job, they're talking about people who won't use htop/btop on their own machine because BLOAT.
  
  you really don’t want your monitoring to take up some significant percentage of that
  
  except it doesn't - both htop and btop use <30 MB
  
  and if 20MB makes a difference, you don't need a different top, you need a different machine
  
  "bloat bad" people are just obnoxious
btop because pretty colors :3

i still need to learn how to use top well though, just in case that's the only option some day. if all else fails i just resort back to ps and (p)kill.
- Now that you mention it, I also have to check out ps just in case...
htop because pretty colors and graphs.

Or top because it's like muscle memory now.
- I like htop more, but btop has better colors and graphs (imo)
  
  Well, you're not wrong. I was away from my desktop when I commented and forgot btop looked so fancy.
  
  For now I still prefer htop because I can see at a glance the stuff I'm most interested in (mem & cpu and process sort).
  
  I'll have to play with some of the other suggestions in the post...
  
  I also am starting to play around with cockpit a little more for remote monitoring.
I'm more of a bottom, if you know what I mean.
- A fellow Rust enjoyer I see.
  
  vtop is nice too since it still is very readable in small windows.
I tend to go with htop purely out of habit. btop is better but I simply don't think to use it.
- Why do you think that? After this post, I will try out both of them but maybe eventually I will still just use top out of, same as you bro, habit.
  
  I find htop to be far more legible, the white blocks of top aren't for me. btop just seems a bit too much for my use, so I never caught on to it. I do believe btop to be better however, since the point of these programs is to see detailed statistics about your system and running programs. btop shoves a lot more information into your face. I really only open htop to find the PID of an app or to find what I need to debloat when I'm in a 1337 h4ck3rm4n mood and trying to make the most minimal system possible.
- Have you considered putting alias htop=btop (or equivalent) in your shell profile?
  
  I could, but like I said in my other reply btop is just a bit overkill for my use-case. Also "fixes" like that just seem a bit hacky, and as if I'm trying too hard to use a program. I shouldn't have to disguise one program as another to be able to use it. That just spells it out plain and clear to me, "I don't need this program".
I'm more of a bottom guy myself
- Thanks for the share. Never heard of this until now and the Temperature Sensor and Disk Utilization widgets are awesome.
Htop, but only because its what I've always used and have no need to change at the moment.
I love btop because of how fancy the graphs look and it also shows disk utilisation. I use it pretty much wherever I can. When I want something more simple I use bottom btm --basic and alias it to top
- Never heard of bottom before, I will check it out. Thanks for the suggestion.
glances
- Never heard of it. I will have to check it out later.
Htop is completly customizable for how the sections of data are displayed. it is a bit convoluted the first time you start, but then it makes
- ...sense.
  
  Yeah not sure what Jerboa did with my last word. Sense is what I typed.
- ...pation
btop for system resource monitoring, htop for actually finding and killing processes
atop, especially because you can take snapshots over time of what the system was doing and use it to backtrack when bad things happen.
- Thanks for the suggestion! I will try it out.
I like btop because of its ease of use and modern gui. When I open top or even htop it feels like I'm using something designed for a dumb terminal from the 70s. When opening btop it feels like something designed for how computers are used now and not 50 years ago.

Also to my knowledge It's the only full system monitor to include GPU monitoring (while other GPU monitors exist they usually only monitor the GPU and not the whole system)
- Agree with you on the beauty of btop, but sometimes less is more and that's why I think it's bloated. When working with the terminal, text-based programs work best on it so htop is much more to my liking due to its minimalist interface.
Much better to quickly determine CPU and memory load.
- top's output does appear somewhat cryptic and hard to digest quickly.
Btop, it's pretty. Htop when I'm lazy or working on a system that's bare bones.
top

Because it exists in nearly every environment I might need to check usage. From my desktop, through laptops, lab machines, routers, embedded systems, IoT to cloud, I don't have to keep the muscle memory of more than one app.
- Yeah, that is the reason I use top in the first place. No need for an extra package and I can use it on pretty much every system.
bpytop, it's just too pretty to pass up.
- I thought btop replaced it. Didn't know that was still around
  
  Edit: looking at the github: it isn't around anymore 😅
  
  Oof, I'm a dumdum. Thanks for the correction.
MeOnTop
btop, since I can use vi bindings to move around in it.
atop and htop and glances and several others 8)
Htop what I use cause it's what I've been using. Only really use it to see what process is taking the most CPU usage or RAM usage. System monitors in general though are mostly useless imo
I am a chad htop enjoyer, I find btop and other alternatives too much on the eyes for me personally and HTOP has enough info for me to take a look at in terms of system resources.

Either that or I just use the regular gnome GUI system monitor lol
I use both htop and btop—depending on the mood. htop is less prettier, but more reliable. But sometimes I want pretty and I go with btop. top is where I draw the line. It's too nerdy for me.
herontop
- Never heard of it.
top is the standard.
btop because it looks cool
I use btop in tmux on my server but on the desktop I run htop in a dropdown terminal when I need to keep am eye on things

As to the why it depends on the use case but on my server I can monitor all disks and networks utilization by interface in addition to processor and memory usage with btop.

Htop is easier to parse due to the colors but I'll still use top if on a remove server to check something in work.
Glances?
They’re different tools with different purposes. What you’re asking is like “which do you prefer, hand driver, box/open end wrench, socket wrench or impact driver?”

Ps and top can be used to very easily figure out and address when processes are screwing up. Atop, htop and btop can be used to directly view stuff hardware reports in real-ish time so you can figure out if a process has stopped being “stepped” across cores, a disk has stopped responding in time or when there’s a lot of network traffic.

As utilities they operate within fundamentally different scopes, to the point with btop of being extremely zoomed out macro pictures that are helpful when taking in abstract information about a system.
I run Tilix with split terminals and always have one with htop running. It is so satisfying finding a troublesome process and killing it in htop.

Looking at you hanged ssh sessions...
the b in btop stands for bloat
- Been a htop guy my whole Linux journey and recently started using btop. I am yet to call my judgement but yeah I feel the same
  
  Same. I am testing g it and have no firm opinion

77 comments