Debian Package of the Day (static archived copy)

Entry submitted by Kristoffer Lundén. DPOTD needs your help. If you want it to continue in 2007, please contribute !

htop is a very competent interactive process viewer for the shell, providing all the functionality - and more - that the top utility does, in an easier and more intuitive way. htop provides easy-to-use menus for most operations and also has support for using a mouse.

In short, htop is an easier to use and friendlier version of top. While it hasn’t as much time behind it and therefore is less tested, it seems to work very well both locally and over SSH, and it’s well worth taking it for a spin. It’s just one of those small utilities that makes life a bit easier.

Target usages:

• Users who don’t want to memorize or constantly look up keyboard shortcuts for top.
• Users who want a clean and friendly interface to view and manage processes in the shell.

Links:

• Upstream homepage
• Screenshots
• FAQ
• htop vs. top

htop is available in Debian stable at version 0.5.1-1, testing and unstable both has 0.6.3-1. Latest Ubuntu release, 6.10/Edgy has 0.6.2-1, while the LTS release (6.06/Dapper) has 0.6-1. The development version (Feisty) currently has version 0.6.3-1. The latest version upstream is currently 0.6.5 and the program is actively maintained.

htop was created by Hisham Muhammad, who is also one of the developers for Gobolinux. Other contributors to the program are listed on the homepage.