htop is an interactive process viewer and system monitor. It’s one of my favorite linux tools that I use regularly to monitor system resources. If you take top and put it on steroids, you get htop.

htop has an awesome visual interface that you can also interact with using your keyboard. The screen packs a lot of information which can be daunting to look at. I tried to find a nice infographic to explain what each number, value or color coded bars mean, but couldn’t find any. Hence I decided to make one myself over the Christmas break.

When you first launch htop, you’ll be greeted with a colorful interface showing a list of all processes running on the system. These are normally ordered by the amount of CPU usage, ordered from highest to lowest. It also shows the status of CPU usage, physical and swap memory.

There’s a lot information in the screenshot. To explain, I’ve separated the interface into upper and lower sections so I have enough room to annotate. (If you want to know, I used Photoshop to annotate the screenshot.)

Let’s start with the upper section. To see higher resolution, please click on the image.

Here’s the lower section of htop.

I hope you found this post useful. Here’s a comparison between top and htop, comparing different features and properties.

If you are using macOS, please note that htop doesn’t come installed by default. You can install it easily using brew . Open the Terminal and type:

$ brew install htop

After the installation is complete, you can launch it by typing htop on the Terminal:

$ sudo htop

Note: sudo is needed to give htop required access on macOS. On Linux, sudo isn’t required.

Until next time.