BTOP
Monitor systems in style
Shashank Sharma doesn’t look dapper in his quickly fading imitation leather jacket, but his terminal is always a sight to behold.
Credit: https://github.com/aristocratos/btop
OUR EXPERT
Shashank Sharma is a trial lawyer in Delhi, India. He’s been writing about open source software for 20 years, and lawyering for 10.
No matter what your system specification is, even if you are running a 12-core machine with hundreds of gigabytes of RAM or more, you will experience bottlenecks. And you will want to use a system monitor to see just what nefarious process is hogging your resources. This is the law. It’s also why there are so many resource monitors on offer for Linux distros. For most Linux users, Top is the de facto system monitor, and you can think of Btop as a super-charged variant.
Written in C++ and released under the Apache Licence 2.0, Btop itself boasts a rich pedigree. The project can trace its roots back to earlier iterations such as Bashtop and Bpytop, written respectively in Bash and Python.
At first glance, Btop is just another resource monitor that can be used to view usage and stats for processor, memory, disks, network and processes. However, the interface and features set it apart from almost all other similar projects. For one, you can control every aspect of the utility using the defined keybindings, or even your mouse. You can also filter processes, switch to a tree view, and even terminate or kill a process from within the Btop interface itself.