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Comment by MomsAVoxell | Hacker News Reader

s/htop/btop/

You'll be glad you did.

What's so good about btop? I personally can't stand its interface, I don't need bells and whistles in my terminal.

It’s something I put in a very small terminal, hitting the 1,2,3,4,5 key until I get the view I need, just right, and there it sits telling me all during my busy compiles and things, just how max’ing my system is.

It’s very informative, well designed for a TUI, and shows me everything I need to see without requiring futzing around with the menu bar, or dealing with registration nagging, or notification popups, or any of the other mundane things the non-terminal performance monitors seem to think is necessary to stain my eyeballs…

Not arguing here, but htop can do the same, no?

The way to think about it is that btop is a prettier, more modern version of htop, uses fewer resources, but is in general a better designed-UI. It provides a better view of system resources than htop, imho .. its timeline-centric views especially.

I have both, and while btop can look nice, has some templates to cycle through, it lacks things I'm using in htop: s for stracing, l for listing open files, and x for which of them are locked.

It also has some templates to cycle through, and can be made to look nice, too. That thing about the resource usage? A few MB more residential? Oh noez! (Maybe depends on compilation options) Only thing coming to mind are too fast updates, compared to btop defaults (Whatever the distro put in there).

Timelines? Don't really care about them in there. Have other means to get them. Seems gimmicky to me in that scope.

Only thing missing in htop is n for netstat/sockstat in htop. That would be nice in addition to s,l,x.

Btop is still installed only to pose sometimes, for some people. Because of the Ooooh Cyber! effect.

But tbh that works with htop too.

Timelines are by no means a gimmick. Out of the box, btop has good rendering of key metrics .. htop does too, but btop is easier to read in a console (imho). Nothing cyber about it. “Ooh cyber” is a lame straw man but hey, you had to make it.

Btop is pretty and has good defaults for many things.

A performance monitor is not a good interface to strace, nor is it a good replacement for lsof, nn, arp, etc.

> “Ooh cyber” is a lame straw

No, not really. To me it felt exactly the same (immature) way. That was a reason why I kept using htop instead. I feel the same about eg k9s, but there's nothing better to migrate off it.

Why is it not a good interface to strace?

The way I'm using it, somewhat customized from the defaults, showing some more, but mainly still showing the process-tree as the largest field...

... I navigate by either arrow-keys or mouse, mark the process, and apply another view of that process with one keypress, be it the default output of strace for that process, or the default of lsof applied to it.

Why should I have to type more than that, when that's enough in most cases?

The same would apply to netstat/ss for that process if htop would support that.

IMO that's a rather comfortable way around all the pids, p(s)kills and whatnot else.

Call me lazy, but after decades of *nix I really don't care anymore ;->

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