btop

latest_release

Index

News
Documents
Description
Features
Themes
Support and funding
Prerequisites (Read this if you are having issues!)
Screenshots
Keybindings
Installation Linux/macOS
Compilation Linux
Compilation macOS
Compilation FreeBSD
Compilation NetBSD
Compilation OpenBSD
GPU compatibility
Installing the snap
Configurability
License

News

7 January 2024

Btop release v1.3.0

Big release with GPU support added for Linux and platform support for OpenBSD. Big thanks to @romner-set (GPU support) and @joske (OpenBSD support) for contributions. And a multitude of bugfixes and small changes, see CHANGELOG.md and latest release for detailed list and attributions.

See news entry below for more information regarding GPU support.

25 November 2023

GPU monitoring added for Linux!

Compile from git main to try it out.

Use keys 5, 6, 7 and 0 to show/hide the gpu monitoring boxes. 5 = Gpu 1, 6 = Gpu 2, etc.

Gpu stats/graphs can also be displayed in the "Cpu box" (not as verbose), see the cpu options menu for info and configuration.

Note that the binaries provided on the release page (when released) and the continuous builds will not have gpu support enabled.

Because the GPU support relies on loading of dynamic gpu libraries, gpu support will not work when also static linking.

See Compilation Linux for more info on how to compile with gpu monitoring support.

Many thanks to @romner-set who wrote the vast majority of the implementation for GPU support.

Big update with version bump to 1.3 coming soon.

28 August 2022

First release of btop4win available at https://github.com/aristocratos/btop4win

16 January 2022

Release v1.2.0 with FreeBSD support. No release binaries for FreeBSD provided as of yet.

Again a big thanks to @joske for his porting efforts!

Since compatibility with Linux, macOS and FreeBSD are done, the focus going forward will be on new features like GPU monitoring.

13 November 2021

Release v1.1.0 with macOS support. Binaries in continuous-build-macos are only x86 for now. macOS binaries + installer are included for both x86 and ARM64 (Apple Silicon) in the releases.

Big thank you to @joske who wrote the vast majority of the implementation!

30 October 2021

Work on the OSX [macOS] and FreeBSD branches, both initiated and mostly worked on by @joske, will likely be completed in the coming weeks. The OSX [macOS] branch has some memory leaks that needs to be sorted out and both have some issues with the processes cpu usage calculation and other smaller issues that needs fixing.

If you want to help out, test for bugs/fix bugs or just try out the branches:

macOS / OSX

# Install and use Homebrew or MacPorts package managers for easy dependency installation
brew install coreutils make gcc@11 lowdown
git clone https://github.com/aristocratos/btop.git
cd btop
git checkout OSX
gmake

FreeBSD

sudo pkg install gmake gcc11 coreutils git lowdown
git clone https://github.com/aristocratos/btop.git
cd btop
git checkout freebsd
gmake

Note that GNU make (gmake) is recommended but not required for macOS/OSX but it is required on FreeBSD.

6 October 2021

macOS development have been started by @joske, big thanks :) See branch OSX for current progress.

18 September 2021

The Linux version of btop++ is complete. Released as version 1.0.0

I will be providing statically compiled binaries for a range of architectures in every release for those having problems compiling.

For compilation GCC 10 is required, GCC 11 preferred.

Please report any bugs to the Issues page.

The development plan right now:

1.1.0 macOS [OSX] support
1.2.0 FreeBSD support
1.3.0 Support for GPU monitoring
1.X.0 Other platforms and features...

Windows support is not in the plans as of now, but if anyone else wants to take it on, I will try to help.

5 May 2021

This project is gonna take some time until it has complete feature parity with bpytop, since all system information gathering will have to be written from scratch without any external libraries. And will need some help in the form of code contributions to get complete support for BSD and macOS/OSX.

</details>

Documents

CHANGELOG.md

CONTRIBUTING.md

CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md

Description

Resource monitor that shows usage and stats for processor, memory, disks, network and processes.

C++ version and continuation of bashtop and bpytop.

Features

Easy to use, with a game inspired menu system.
Full mouse support, all buttons with a highlighted key is clickable and mouse scroll works in process list and menu boxes.
Fast and responsive UI with UP, DOWN keys process selection.
Function for showing detailed stats for selected process.
Ability to filter processes.
Easy switching between sorting options.
Tree view of processes.
Send any signal to selected process.
UI menu for changing all config file options.
Auto scaling graph for network usage.
Shows IO activity and speeds for disks.
Battery meter
Selectable symbols for the graphs.
Custom presets
And more...

Themes

Btop++ uses the same theme files as bpytop and bashtop (some color values missing in bashtop themes) .

See themes folder for available themes.

The make install command places the default themes in [$PREFIX or /usr/local]/share/btop/themes. User created themes should be placed in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/btop/themes or $HOME/.config/btop/themes.

Let me know if you want to contribute with new themes.

Support and funding

You can sponsor this project through github, see my sponsors page for options.

Or donate through paypal or ko-fi.

Any support is greatly appreciated!

Prerequisites

For best experience, a terminal with support for:

24-bit truecolor (See list of terminals with truecolor support)
256-color terminals are supported through 24-bit to 256-color conversion when setting "truecolor" to False in the options or with "-lc/--low-color" arguments.
16 color TTY mode will be activated if a real tty device is detected. Can be forced with "-t/--tty_on" arguments.
Wide characters (Are sometimes problematic in web-based terminals)

Also needs a UTF8 locale and a font that covers:

Unicode Block “Braille Patterns” U+2800 - U+28FF (Not needed in TTY mode or with graphs set to type: block or tty.)
Unicode Block “Geometric Shapes” U+25A0 - U+25FF
Unicode Block "Box Drawing" and "Block Elements" U+2500 - U+259F

Optional Dependencies (Needed for GPU monitoring)

GPU monitoring also requires a btop binary built with GPU support (GPU_SUPPORT=true flag).

See GPU compatibility section for more about compiling with GPU support.

NVIDIA

If you have an NVIDIA GPU you must use an official NVIDIA driver, both the closed-source and open-source ones have been verified to work.

In addition to that you must also have the nvidia-ml dynamic library installed, which should be included with the driver package of your distribution.

AMD

If you have an AMD GPU rocm_smi_lib is required, which may or may not be packaged for your distribution.

Notice (Text rendering issues)

If you are having problems with the characters in the graphs not looking like they do in the screenshots, it's likely a problem with your systems configured fallback font not having support for braille characters.
See Terminess Powerline for an example of a font that includes the braille symbols.
See comments by @sgleizes link and @XenHat link in issue #100 for possible solutions.
If text are misaligned and you are using Konsole or Yakuake, turning off "Bi-Directional text rendering" is a possible fix.
Characters clipping in to each other or text/border misalignments is not bugs caused by btop, but most likely a fontconfig or terminal problem where the braille characters making up the graphs aren't rendered correctly.
Look to the creators of the terminal emulator you use to fix these issues if the previous mentioned fixes don't work for you.

Screenshots

Main UI showing details for a selected process

Screenshot 1

Main UI in TTY mode

Screenshot 2

Main UI with custom options

Screenshot 3

Main-menu

Options-menu

Help-menu

Installation

Binaries for Linux are statically compiled with musl and works on kernel 2.6.39 and newer

Download btop-(VERSION)-(ARCH)-(PLATFORM).tbz from latest release and unpack to a new folder

Notice! Use x86_64 for 64-bit x86 systems, i486 and i686 are 32-bit!

Install (from created folder)

Run install.sh or:

# use "make install PREFIX=/target/dir" to set target, default: /usr/local
# only use "sudo" when installing to a NON user owned directory
sudo make install

(Optional) Set suid bit to make btop always run as root (or other user)

Enables signal sending to any process without starting with sudo and can prevent /proc read permissions problems on some systems.
- Run setuid.sh or:
```
# run after make install and use same PREFIX if any was used at install
# set SU_USER and SU_GROUP to select user and group, default is root:root
sudo make setuid
```

Uninstall
- Run uninstall.sh or:
```
sudo make uninstall
```
Show help
```
make help
```

Binary release (from native os repo)

openSUSE
- Tumbleweed:
```
sudo zypper in btop
```
- For all other versions, see openSUSE Software: btop
Fedora
```
sudo dnf install btop
```

RHEL/AlmaLinux 8+

sudo dnf install epel-release
sudo dnf install btop

FreeBSD
```
pkg install btop
```
NetBSD
```
pkg_add btop
```

Binary release on Homebrew (macOS (x86_64 & ARM64) / Linux (x86_64))

Homebrew
```
brew install btop
```

Compilation Linux

Requires at least GCC 10 or Clang 16.

The makefile also needs GNU coreutils and sed (should already be installed on any modern distribution).

GPU compatibility

Btop++ supports NVIDIA and AMD GPUs out of the box on Linux x86_64, provided you have the correct drivers and libraries.

Compatibility with Intel GPUs using generic DRM calls is planned, as is compatibility for FreeBSD and macOS.

Gpu support will not work when static linking glibc (or musl, etc.)!

For x86_64 Linux the flag GPU_SUPPORT is automatically set to true, to manually disable gpu support set the flag to false, like:

make GPU_SUPPORT=false (or cmake -DBTOP_GPU=false with CMake)

NVIDIA

You must use an official NVIDIA driver, both the closed-source and open-source ones have been verified to work.

In addition to that you must also have the nvidia-ml dynamic library installed, which should be included with the driver package of your distribution.
AMD

AMDGPU data is queried using the ROCm SMI library, which may or may not be packaged for your distribution. If your distribution doesn't provide a package, btop++ is statically linked to ROCm SMI with the RSMI_STATIC=true make flag.

This flag expects the ROCm SMI source code in lib/rocm_smi_lib, and compilation will fail if