Brief: Monitoring CPU utilization in Linux becomes a bit better with Stress Terminal UI.

For we terminal lovers, the more terminal tools, the better. I’ve covered a number of terminal tools before, including music player, file browser. Today, I’m here with a monitoring tool that can visualize various parameters of your CPU inside your terminal.

I know that we have covered CoreFreq CPU Utilization tool in the past but that tool was meant for advanced users. Stress Terminal UI is a lot easier to use and comprehend.

Stress Terminal UI for CPU monitoring in Linux

Stress Terminal UI (s-tui for short) is CPU monitoring tool that runs entirely within your terminal. It is written in Python and is developed by Alex Manuskin. Let’s take a look first:

It has a visually pleasant and clean interface. If you want a smooth graph plotting, you can check the relevant options.

Features

Stress Terminal UI offers the following features:

Visualize CPU Frequency, Utilization, Temperature and Power Usage

Displays performance dips caused by thermal throttling

Lightweight and uses minimal resources

Requires no display server (i.e. X-server for most Linux distros)

Stress Operation mode for stress testing the CPU

You can hide specific sections if you don’t need them. Here’s how it looks with smooth graph plotting and only Frequency and Power Usage sections enabled:

s-tui also supports stress testing your CPU. It uses the stress command-line tool in the background for stressing the CPU. If you select the Stress Operation mode, you will notice that all the graphs will hit their maximum values:

You can also tweak the stress testing parameters from the Stress Options:

s-tui also displays the CPU information in textual form at the bottom:

If you want to observe various CPU parameters of you computer Stress Terminal UI is a really nice tool. It is especially helpful for monitoring your remote systems or VPS.

S-tui doesn’t show specific information about the processes running on the system, it just visualizes the overall situation. So, if you want a tool that reports information about individual processes or want to manage those processes, s-tui can’t really help you with that.

Installation on Ubuntu and other Linux distributions

For installing s-tui, you will need a Python environment set up on your system and the pip command has to be available. You can see how to install pip on Ubuntu Linux in this tutorial.

Run the following command for installing it:

pip install s-tui --user

If you want to install it system-wide, you will have to run pip with sudo:

sudo pip install s-tui

That is enough for installing s-tui but if you want to use the Stress Operation mode, you will also have to install stress on your system. It’s just a simple apt command away:

sudo apt install stress

Now, you are ready to use s-tui on your system. If you find any bug you can report it on their GitHub page:

Stress-Terminal UI

What do you think about s-tui? Is it something you would use for CPU monitoring in Linux? Do you use some other tool to monitor CPU utilization?