Btop: A better modern alternative of htop with a gamified interface
Mood
thoughtful
Sentiment
mixed
Category
tech
Key topics
system monitoring tools
CLI/TUI design
btop
The post introduces btop, a modern alternative to htop with a visually appealing interface, sparking a discussion about its features, design, and comparison to other system monitoring tools.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
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- 01Story posted
11/8/2025, 2:50:51 PM
10d ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
11/8/2025, 4:17:12 PM
1h after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
114 comments in Day 1
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Step 03 - 04Latest activity
11/13/2025, 5:49:23 AM
6d ago
Step 04
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Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
"Editorialized" implied deceit was intended. It looks to me like the submitter was trying to be descriptive.
The very first item in the feature list is
> Easy to use, with a game inspired menu system.
"Poorly described" would be correct. "Editorialized" does not mean what you think it means. See my previous comment.
It was the submitter's opinion that "gamified" was an accurate description for this page instead of using the actual title of the page.
So while "editorialized" is a little formal, it is correct.
Reporting on controversial issues is often editorialized, which may be where your feeling that it relates to deceit is coming from.
That does seem obviously like an opinion, however there are some things that don't seem like an opinion that can still be considered an opinion.
This fits a whole class of headlines, which are described as editorialized, some of which seem more opinionated than this and some which seem less opinionated. I'm not sure whether it's better wrangle the use of opinion and the definition of opinion to make these satisfy the dictionary definition of editorialized or accept that the use of language has evolved and it's better not to be overly prescriptive.
That's all.
They could have described it as "game-like design" or something else.
Editorialized here simply means applying editor-level changes to the title of the website to express an opinion. No deceit is implied. It is against HN guidelines unless the title is unclear or does not fit.
that said a enjoy looking at code for projects that are multi os so cheers for op.
Also fsdoom: https://dos.itch.io/fsdoom
DOOM
====
:) NEW GAME
OPTIONS
LOAD GAME
SAVE GAME
QUIT
BTOP++
==== v1.3.2
-> OPTIONS
HELP
QUIT
Anyone remember top? I was so happy to switch to htop that had colors!
btop: done
And most of those TUI are badly designed in terms of configurability. Especially the ise of colors and “effects”.
Sure they have, or at least it has been tried. I think it turns out to be such a hard problem to solve that it degrades into proper programing much faster than a cli where pipes can carry hard.
Some examples:
The first xerox alto interface.
smalltalk
Microsofts OLE
1. the title was unneccessarily editorialized, 2. the word gamified is used wrong here, and 3. There was never any good reason to add the word gamified to the title, other than adding a buzzword.
The feedback people give is probably a bit harsh, but I find it understandable. If you don’t know what a term means, don’t use it - especially not if it’s completely unnecessary as in this case.
Is btop basically just extending where it can run?
- CPU usage graph (global and per cpu)
- CPU temp + graph
- GPU usage
- Memory graphs
- Disks space infos + real-time IO
- Network graph, one for each network device, upload/download stats since opening the app
- Per program cpu graph, memory graph
You should try it.
I'm using 3.4.1, so it's possible you have an older version that doesn't have it.
btop in contrast, currently shows me: GPU utilization (graph/historic+current), clock speed, power-state, power usage, encoding/decoding utilization, VRAM frequency, VRAM bandwidth utilization (graph+current) + VRAM total/free usage and finally the current transmit/receive rate to/from VRAM.
This is not that, but… honestly I don't think I want a game-menu-UIfied top either. Most games' UI is barely tolerable…
(Ed.: looks like it's just poor titling in the HN submission)
I have used htop forever, but would be happy to hear of a compelling reason to switch.
I have a few more listed + notes on them here: https://docs.sweeting.me/s/system-monitoring-tools#All-in-on...
"I'm having trouble finding one true activity monitor on mac. I tried all of these on mac with certain criteria in mind (reliability, renicing, good UX):
- Activity Monitor: doesn't update charts when in background, doesn't show nice value, doesn't allow renice, doesn't hide idle processes
- Apple's top: non-standard, information overload, no nice/renice/idle/filter
- htop: doesn't show accurate process cpu usages (known bug awaiting release), no idle hiding. (Use latest release to avoid crashes.)
- btop: hangs (known bug awaiting release), no nice/renice/idle hiding
- bottom: basic
- gotop: I forget
- glances: pretty good, supports nice & renice. That or htop seem to be the only options for that. glances is CPU-heavy.
- zenith: also good, faster, and at least shows nice. (Crashes if you sort by it, known bug awaiting fix.)"
I went with zenith.
btop: A monitor of resources
As per HN guidelines [0] -
> Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
I don't know if this will replace htop for me. The main feature seems to be 24 bit color and some aggressive styling. I'm too old fashioned for that.
I kind of avoided it too, htop, bmon, iotop and nvidia-smi worked fine as it was. But eventually came across it for the Nth time and finally tried it out, it's basically all of them in one, with some nicer graphs and customization. Do I require it to do my job? No, but with it I need 3-4 tmux panes less to see the same info. Also does most of the stuff I used htop for, sorting by different things, filtering by letters and easy to kill the currently selected process.
https://github.com/aristocratos/btop/issues/912
It wasn't uncommon for gigabytes of ram getting taken up after a day or two of uptime
I've written up some thoughts on the design of btop here: https://abstractnonsense.xyz/micro-blog/2025-04-26-btop-of-y...
There is also Below. Which has a much more htop/btop like interface than dstat. Below records system info over time, and allows time travel! However, it's not as convenient as dstat, not at a glance, as one has to to scrub through time. But it is pretty impressive system monitoring, great for what it is! It's per-process pressure metrics are also utterly unbeatable. The way it rolls up cgroups is also stellar. https://github.com/facebookincubator/below
- per physical core clock next to the per core temperature and usage
- multiple top subwindows that can each be sorted by different things (it's nice to see who's hogging CPU, memory, and GPU)
- more UPS / battery support, namely hooks into power usage
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