Okay, hear me out. You want to keep an eye on your system for things like RAM use, disk space, processor load and more…but you want something a tiny bit flashy that's still simple enough to run in a terminal window? You need to try out bpytop.
It's a fully featured resource monitor with a "game inspired menu system" and it's genuinely great, I've fallen just a little bit in love with it having it open on my second monitor to keep me informed of how my system is doing. Just look at how gosh-darn awesome it looks:
Thanks to the process selection feature, you can also use it to send "SIGTERM, SIGKILL, SIGINT" to individual processes if you need to get rid of them or if they're stuck. I can see this being incredibly useful. It does practically everything you need and it looks good while doing so.
bpytop is actually a port to Python of another project named bashtop, with the creator suggesting people move on over to bpytop due to it being faster, less resource hungry, mouse support, graphs for memory consumption and more new advanced features.
Their "game inspired" menu is a nice bit of fluff too, giving you a quick and easy way to adjust various settings - very much like you actually would find in a game.
The developer appears to have plans to expand it too with GPU support for temperatures and load, options for resizing all boxes, CPU and mem stats for docker containers (if possible) and the usual optimizations.
As a bit of icing on the cake, you can theme it too.
Check bpytop out on GitHub.
Last edited by libgradev on 15 October 2020 at 3:30 pm UTC
Quoting: brokeassbenNice! I've been using Bashtop (which is great) and this looks like it includes a bunch of improvements on it. Bashtop is arguably a better/catchier name, though. It's extremely useful to use over a terminal SSH session.I was going to ask how this is different from bashtop, as they both look pretty.
Quoting: slaapliedjeI was going to ask how this is different from bashtop, as they both look pretty.Looks like it's the same person who was developing bashtop. This is a quote from their GitHub that Liam touched on:
QuoteIt's a lot faster and about a third as cpu heavy and has more features, including:
- Mouse support
- Toggleable mini mode
- More customization
- Graphs for memory consumption
It's also a lot easier for me to bug fix and it's the project I'm actively working on, so please try to migrate to bpytop.
Quoting: liberodarksame as bashtop :(Do people just not bother reading the article any more or what?
Quoting: Liam DaweQuoting: liberodarksame as bashtop :(Do people just not bother reading the article any more or what?
Welcome to
Maybe it's time to invent a new way to draw in terminals...
Quoting: aristoriasThese fancy terminal applications eat up an non insignificant amount of CPU resources and don't do much more than ugly ones besides looking pretty.
Maybe it's time to invent a new way to draw in terminals...
Yeah fancy 'tui'-style applications have been a constant source of frustration for me. Not only do they tend to be sluggish, but they get broken in all sorts of ways under tmux.
I'm not convinced either that a desktop user needs to have all that information *continuously* updated on the screen, by the way. There are numerous specialized -top applications that one can run to diagnose something when the need arises. I used to have fully decked-out stats plugins on my system toolbar at all times, but then I realized that I meaningful use of just one (netstats).
It looks horrible.
Quoting: Liam DaweI admit I only skimmed it as people callex work were bothering me to do some things.Quoting: liberodarksame as bashtop :(Do people just not bother reading the article any more or what?
Now to wait 10 years for bpytop to be packaged for enterprise Linux so I can use it. :)
bpytop version: 1.0.42
psutil version: 5.7.0
Quoting: slaapliedjeNow to wait 10 years for bpytop to be packaged for enterprise Linux so I can use it. :)
Looks like it's already in the EPEL8 repo? And plenty of others, depending on how you define "packaged for enterprise".
See more from me