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bpytop might be the freaking-coolest way to monitor your Linux system

By - | Views: 52,651

Okay, hear me out. You want to keep an eye on your system for things like RAM use, disk space, processor load and more…but you want something a tiny bit flashy that's still simple enough to run in a terminal window? You need to try out bpytop.

It's a fully featured resource monitor with a "game inspired menu system" and it's genuinely great, I've fallen just a little bit in love with it having it open on my second monitor to keep me informed of how my system is doing. Just look at how gosh-darn awesome it looks:

Thanks to the process selection feature, you can also use it to send "SIGTERM, SIGKILL, SIGINT" to individual processes if you need to get rid of them or if they're stuck. I can see this being incredibly useful. It does practically everything you need and it looks good while doing so.

bpytop is actually a port to Python of another project named bashtop, with the creator suggesting people move on over to bpytop due to it being faster, less resource hungry, mouse support, graphs for memory consumption and more new advanced features.

Their "game inspired" menu is a nice bit of fluff too, giving you a quick and easy way to adjust various settings - very much like you actually would find in a game.

The developer appears to have plans to expand it too with GPU support for temperatures and load, options for resizing all boxes, CPU and mem stats for docker containers (if possible) and the usual optimizations.

As a bit of icing on the cake, you can theme it too.

Check bpytop out on GitHub.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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About the author -
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
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aristorias Oct 15, 2020
These fancy terminal applications eat up an non insignificant amount of CPU resources and don't do much more than ugly ones besides looking pretty.
Maybe it's time to invent a new way to draw in terminals...
minidou Oct 15, 2020
Now it just needs to be rewritten in rust.
KohlyKohl Oct 15, 2020
I prefer the original, bashtop, since it doesn't use Python...
wvstolzing Oct 15, 2020
Quoting: aristoriasThese fancy terminal applications eat up an non insignificant amount of CPU resources and don't do much more than ugly ones besides looking pretty.
Maybe it's time to invent a new way to draw in terminals...

Yeah fancy 'tui'-style applications have been a constant source of frustration for me. Not only do they tend to be sluggish, but they get broken in all sorts of ways under tmux.

I'm not convinced either that a desktop user needs to have all that information *continuously* updated on the screen, by the way. There are numerous specialized -top applications that one can run to diagnose something when the need arises. I used to have fully decked-out stats plugins on my system toolbar at all times, but then I realized that I meaningful use of just one (netstats).
tomaszg Oct 15, 2020
Maybe finally I'll be able to get rid of Gkrellm. Although Doom plugin for it is still one of the coolest things :)
Seegras Oct 15, 2020
Don't try this in rxvt.

It looks horrible.
slaapliedje Oct 15, 2020
Quoting: Liam Dawe
Quoting: liberodarksame as bashtop :(
Do people just not bother reading the article any more or what?
I admit I only skimmed it as people callex work were bothering me to do some things.

Now to wait 10 years for bpytop to be packaged for enterprise Linux so I can use it. :)
iskaputt Oct 15, 2020
Tried it in alacritty and found the performance to be pretty bad. Each stat update froze the whole UI for a moment, making it unresponsive to input as well. And it took about 3 seconds to fully start. It does look fancy though, but that is subjective.

bpytop version: 1.0.42
psutil version: 5.7.0
Teq Oct 15, 2020
Sweet zombie Jesus; this is amazing!
Phlebiac Oct 16, 2020
Quoting: slaapliedjeNow to wait 10 years for bpytop to be packaged for enterprise Linux so I can use it. :)

Looks like it's already in the EPEL8 repo? And plenty of others, depending on how you define "packaged for enterprise".
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