Using htop

While top is great, htop is better - if not more time tested. I wanted to go over a few useful things htop can do.

For starters htop has mouse support, which while not amazing - it's also not something that is very well known.

Hitting F5 will set you up with process trees, or you can alternatively enable this by default using F2 to enter setup and setting it there. In your root folder you will find .htoprc which contains any of these changes.

'M' sorts by memory usage, which is a bit simpler than the ways to do it via top.


Finally killing processes is improved. In top you had to type the pid in, which was less than useful - in htop you can just hit k and kill the selected process, and then select the signal like -9 or -1 You can also nice tasks similarly with the + and - keys. If I'm not mistaken in top you had to once again provide a pid.