Htop: It's like top turned up to 11

I'm a big user of the top utility, which provides a whole lot of data on what processes are running and how much memory and CPU they're using. I open up a terminal window and run top more than a few times every day.

I've seen htop before but haven't bothered to install it on any of my boxes in quite awhile.

I don't know what prompted me to do so, but I finally installed htop in Ubuntu 8.04. It's easy to do:

$ sudo aptitude install htop

And to run htop:

$ htop

The great thing about htop is that you can kill a process from the application itself. Just arrow down to the offending process and hit F9 to kill it.

It's a lot easier than opening up a new terminal window and using "kill" the old-fashioned way.

I just had to kill Firefox, which was pegging the CPU for some reason, and htop saved me a few steps.

Htop actually has configuration options, which can be accessed with the F2 key while in the application. I'm not at the point yet where I'm ready to mess with this, but I've known for awhile that the output of top can also be screwed with via command-line switches. Haven't done that, either, but it's nice to know that both top and htop have options.

And I really, really like being able to kill processes from within htop.