btop

btop (formerly bashtop) is a beautifully designed, feature-rich resource monitor that displays real-time information about CPU usage, memory consumption, disk I/O, network traffic, and running processes in a terminal user interface. Created by aristocratos, the project began as bashtop (a bash script) and was later rewritten in C++ as btop for significantly better performance and cross-platform support. The interface is divided into several panels: a CPU panel (showing per-core and total usage with configurable graph types including box graphs, braille graphs, and sparkline graphs, along with CPU frequency, temperature, and load average), a memory panel (showing RAM and swap usage with process-level breakdown), a network panel (showing download and upload speeds with configurable graph display), and a process list (showing detailed information for all running processes including PID, user, memory and CPU usage, command, threads, and more). Key features include: mouse support (click to select, scroll to navigate, drag to resize panels), full keyboard navigation and control, customizable color themes (with built-in theme support and the ability to import community-created themes), process management (kill, terminate, interrupt, or send signals to selected processes), filtering and sorting (by CPU, memory, PID, user, name, or command), a tree view for displaying parent-child process hierarchies, support for box-drawing characters using Unicode and SIXEL graphics for advanced terminal rendering, configurable update intervals, and cross-platform support (Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, and Android via Termux). As of 2026, btop has over 23,000 stars.