bovenop—listen and watch processes by name

Observe memory, cpu, and disk I/O for processes matching the provided name.

This program is helpful when running a number of processes you want to keep track of as they run and end. It was designed to keep a basic overview of the memory peak and evolution of the same program through a number of small tweaks and changes.

When programs are finished, they become 'wilted': their entries are dimmed and collapsed into condensed representations.

See also my thread about this program.

Installation

You know the drill, probably, but you can install it with cargo.

cargo install bovenop

Usage

Open bovenop and listen for processes with some name.

bovenop <program-name>

Within the interface, the following controls are currently available.

• To clear and reset all entries, press r.
• Use C and E to collapse and expand all entries, respectively.
• Exit with ^C or q.

Future work and contributions

There is a lot that could be improved, but it does the basic job I created it for.

• I think simple navigation and selection-based collapsing/expanding (lowercase c and e) would be pleasant.
• Scrolling through longer listes of processes.
• Selecting between chronological and reverse-chronological representations would be useful, especially if new processes slowly push old ones outside of the scroll view.
• An explicit marker for dead processes would be good. The current way of showing wilted processes is through dimming, which is not very visible under some circumstances.
• Rudimentary color selection support to provide better visibility for other users' needs.
• A marker showing the highest recorded peak memory, for example, could be useful.
• Regular expression matching on process names.
• The ability to provide a list of accepted process names.
• Flags for setting the width and presence or absence of some categories. For instance, you may want to just see memory and CPU information, with an extra wide memory chart.

It must be noted, however, that none of these features may become a reality. This is just a tool I wrote for myself to do a particular thing, after all :)

Contributions

This project is created and maintained by Marieke and Bauke Westendorp.

We very much welcome input from people based actual needs in the form of issues, emails, or fedi posts. As with many of our projects, we appreciate and welcome code contributions, provided we have had some prior discussion about it where we briefly discuss the design of any non-trivial changes. Additional contact options can be found on our sites.

License

Copyright © 2025, Marieke Westendorp. Copyright © 2025, Bauke Westendorp.

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.