htop

by Hisham Muhammad hisham@gobolinux.org (2004 - 2016)

memetop patches

by Kevin Orr

Introduction

This is memetop, a fork of Hisham Muhammad's htop, an interactive process viewer. It requires ncurses. It is developed primarily on Linux, but we also have code for running under FreeBSD and Mac OS X (help and testing are wanted for these platforms!)

This software has evolved considerably over the years, and is reasonably complete, but there is always room for improvement.

Comparison between memetop and classic htop

• In htop, percent memory usage is called MEM%, while in memetop it is called MEME%.
• All documentation is updated accordingly.
• Continuous integration is run to make sure I didn't break anything of Muhammad's when I essentially ran sed on his entire code base.
• Since this is a fork of htop that maintains full backward compatibility (as well as maintaining upstream merging), the name of the program remains htop. Feel free to symlink it to memetop or even maymaytop.

Comparison between classic htop and even classic-er top

• In htop you can scroll the list vertically and horizontally to see all processes and full 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.
• In htop you can kill multiple processes at once.
• top is older, hence, more tested.

Compilation instructions

This program is distributed as a standard autotools-based package. See the INSTALL file for detailed instructions.

When compiling from a release tarball, run:

./configure && make

For compiling sources downloaded from the Git repository, run:

./autogen.sh && ./configure && make

By default make install will install into /usr/local, for changing the path use ./configure --prefix=/some/path.

See the manual page (man htop) or the on-line help ('F1' or 'h' inside htop) for a list of supported key commands.

If not all keys work check your curses configuration.

License

GNU General Public License, version 2 (GPL-2.0)