A coworker of mine showed me a small utility he read about on LifeHacker (Manage Processes with htop) this morning. I checked out the htop project site and quickly downloaded the source rpm and built the package and installed it on one of my Fedora boxes at home.
Here’s how htop compares to top, taken straight from the htop project site:
Comparison between htop and top
- In ‘htop’ you can scroll the list vertically and horizontally to see all processes and complete command lines.
- In ‘top’ you are subject to a delay for each unassigned key you press (especially annoying when multi-key escape sequences are triggered by accident).
- ‘htop’ starts faster (‘top’ seems to collect data for a while before displaying anything).
- In ‘htop’ you don’t need to type the process number to kill a process, in ‘top’ you do.
- In ‘htop’ you don’t need to type the process number or the priority value to renice a process, in ‘top’ you do.
- ‘htop’ supports mouse operation, ‘top’ doesn’t
- ‘top’ is older, hence, more used and tested.
All I can say is I’ll probably not use ‘top’ anymore. It’s htop for me going forward…
htop – an interactive process viewer for Linux – http://htop.sourceforge.net/