Htop Interactive Process Viewer

Htop is an interactive cross-platform process viewer and system monitor that provides a real-time, full-screen, colorized display of running processes, system resources, and performance metrics. Written in C, it serves as a modern alternative to the traditional top command, offering an intuitive curses-based interface with mouse support for selecting, sorting, and killing processes. It displays comprehensive system information including CPU utilization per core with load average indicators, memory and swap usage with detailed breakdowns, network and disk I/O statistics on supported platforms, and a process tree view showing parent-child relationships. Users can interactively sort processes by any column, send signals to processes with function key shortcuts, customize the displayed columns and meters, and configure color schemes. The tool supports extensive customization through its configuration file, allowing persistent settings for display options, column layouts, and custom meters. It runs on a wide range of platforms including Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonFly BSD, Solaris, and macOS. Advanced features include process searching and filtering by name or user, tags for batch operations on multiple processes, detailed per-process information including environment variables and open files on supported systems, and the ability to change process priority and CPU affinity. The project is actively maintained with over 8,000 GitHub stars and regular releases improving platform compatibility and adding new features such as delayed screen updates and ZFS ARC memory display on Linux.