htop: like top, but awesome

If you’ve been hacking at your linux CLI for a little while, you’re probably familiar with the pic below. If not, just type ‘top’ (no quotes) and your terminal will spring to life with an ever-updating process and usage display.

While very useful, top’s output is oogly. It’s the 21st century already! Let’s use some colors!!

Thankfully, htop is here to save our day. To install on a Debian-based linux, simply type:

sudo apt-get install htop

now we should have htop installed at /usr/bin/htop. Let’s add a quick alias so we don’t accidentally launch top anymore. Open your .bashrc in your favorite editor and add the following code to it:

if [ -f /usr/bin/htop ];then
  alias top='htop'
fi

Now whenever you start a terminal session and type top you’ll launch htop instead (but only if htop is installed on the system). Quickly tell bash to re-read your configuration file and try launching htop!

And there’s the awesome