Friendship With 'Htop' Ended, Now 'Btop' Is My System Monitor!

Today I want to share with you a really cool terminalbased system monitor. This program is called BTOP or actually they call it BTOP++. Uh if you look at like the release announcements, it's uh the program name is Btop++ but when you install it as a package like a binary package on your Linux distribution, the package is typically called just BTOP. Now you can probably guess the language it's written in. If they're calling it Btop++, yes, it is written in C++. But this project is actually based on some older projects because I remember oh about five or six years ago, I covered a uh a system process viewer, a terminal based process viewer that was called Bashtop. And Bashtop later became B Pytop because they didn't want to write it in bash anymore. They wrote it in Python. And now we've got BTOP. and BTOP is written in C++ but there were all very very similar programs just in different languages. Now for me when I'm in the terminal and I want to uh check system resource usage or kill a process my u system monitor of choice is htop that's kind of like always been my preferred program that's kind of a Linux standard but I really like this BTOP program. If I switch to an empty workspace here and let me launch a terminal and let me launch BTOP. One of the immediate things you will notice with BTOP, it is very colorful, right? It it really looks good. And if you care about aesthetics, and of course many of us on Linux do care about how our desktop looks, right? We like making really fancy screenshots. And certainly if you were making a screenshot of say your tiling window manager desktop and you wanted to show a terminalbased program right btop certainly looks better than htop. Now some of the stuff that's going on here you got a lot of information here. And this is one of the things about this particular program is you've got a ton of stuff. You've got CPU. This is CPU here in this box over here. You can see more CPU information. And you're seeing all of the uh 24 threads of my 24th thread CPU, right? So uh you get temperature information and percentages as far as how much of that particular thread is being used. And then down here you've got memory, you've got disk, you've got network, and here is your process viewer. Now, what's cool about this particular program, it does have mouse support. So if I click on menu here, I will get a menu, and I can go into options. Let's actually do this real quick because there are a ton of options you could set. Uh you could play around with settings for this and it's kind of gaming inspired, right, with the graphics. They mentioned that on their GitHub that it's a a gaming style menu system. Uh some of the things you could set though, one of the more interesting ones is the very first one under the general tab is your color scheme. For me, I'm just using TTY. Basically, it's pulling uh whatever color scheme um my terminal is setting. But if I wanted to change to something else, for example, Ever Forest or Kanagawa, I don't know what that is. Nord, I'm not a fan of Nord. Gruff Box. I'm not a fan of Grub Box. I'm just going to go back to TTY. But then there's several color schemes you could set. You've also got settings for whether you want to uh set true color or force uh TTY, whether you want to use the Vim keys. I've got that set to true because I actually like navigating with the Vim keys. So, for example, if I'm in the process viewer here, I can navigate with the up and down arrows through the processes. I'm using the arrows, but if I wanted to, I could also do this with J for down and K for up. Now, I mentioned it does have some mouse support, but ideally, you probably want to use the keyboard to do things with this because everything is keyboard driven and you've got little hints for each thing here as far as the uh key binding for it. for example, CPU, which is this block here, right? If I want to turn off this entire block, you can see it's set to the number one. So, I'm going to type one on the keyboard, and that whole CPU block went away. If I wanted it back, I could hit one on the keyboard again, and it comes back. If I don't want to view uh memory here or or disc because they're all part of the same block, memory and disc side by side, or number two on the keyboard. So, number two, and all of that goes away. Maybe I don't want the network as well. Let me type three and it goes away. Now I just have the CPU block and number four is the process viewer. So I've been able to make that a lot wider. If I want to turn back on everything, let me turn on the network by hitting three again. Turn back on memory and disc by hitting number two. One interesting thing you have is you have presets. You see right now we have preset and then asterisk. Uh if you type P because that's the hint, right? Type P on the keyboard. This is preset zero. This is your default look. If I hit P again, we go to preset one, which is this look here where we have the process viewer at the top and then the CPU at the bottom. If I hit P again, this is preset two, which is CPU at the top, memory and disk, and then network with no process viewer. This is preset three. Uh, just mainly CPU and network. If I hit one more time P, I get back to preset zero, which is the default view. Typically, you're going to use this kind of system resource monitor for viewing processes, seeing what is sucking up all of your CPU and RAM, maybe killing a process. And again, you do have mouse support. So, if I want to click here, it doesn't really scroll. Well, it scrolls with the mouse wheel, but I was going to try to grab it, and I can't grab it. So, but if I click an area, I can tell this the scroll bar where to go. But if you want to use the mouse scroll wheel, it does scroll. Now when I select a process, if I select a process for example with the mouse or I could have done the arrow keys or J and K to move up and down. But when I find a process now I get some menus down here. You can see T for terminate, K for kill, S for signals. And if I just hit uh the enter key on the keyboard, I get a little bit more information about this particular process. If I hit enter again, that goes away. If I want to terminate this particular process, again, T on the the keyboard, and it tells me it's about to send a SIG term to process ID 1492, which is Flameshot. Flameshot is a uh screenshot utility. It's actually sitting in my CIS tray right now. I've got the Flameshot uh icon in my system tray. If I wanted to kill that, I could click with the mouse or I could hit enter for yes. And that process, you can see, was terminated. And for me, when I use these kinds of programs like htop, that's typically what I'm doing. Usually, there's some program that's out of control that didn't shut down properly and I've got to go and like use the nuclear option, right? I've got to go kill the thing using a program like BTOP in this case. Now, for those of you that want to try out BTOP, BTOP, I did install it uh through the Arch repos. I can't remember if it was in the standard repos or in the AUR. They also have it packaged as a snap pack. So, uh, if you've got snaps on your system, you will find BTOP packaged as a snap if you prefer to install it that way. But BTOP U is free and open source software and has been a pretty popular program in some form or fashion over the years, over a number of years now. So, you will probably find it in your distributions repositories. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. But I need to thank Matt Steve 40mm, kept caveman, Darloff, Lee, Jersey Killer, Mark Methos, Urion, Paul Peace, Archavore, Realities for Lust, Red Profit, Roland, Morgan, Abuntu, and Willie. These guys, they're my highest tier patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, this quick look at BTOP would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now, these are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work, want to see more videos about Linux and free and open source software, subscribe to Dro Tube over on Patreon. Peace, guys.