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Bottom: The new top

From Top to Bottom

Article from ADMIN 80/2024

By Federico Lucifredi

Bottom is the latest process and system monitoring terminal user interface tool, delivering lightweight but beautiful monitoring.

Bottom (btm) [1] is the humorously named successor to top. Blending mouse interaction and keystrokes in a terminal window, Bottom is pushing forward a crowded, ever-advancing field led until recently by bashtop [2] [3], its more performant cousin bpytop [4], and many others [5] alongside the evergreen original top [6].

Rust-based, Bottom promises a more lightweight and highly customizable cross-platform experience; on macOS, install via Brew (brew install bottom). On Ubuntu, the choice of hosting packages in GitHub repos instead of Ubuntu Universe makes the command choice dependent on architecture in the apt path, but a straightforward Snap install is available:

sudo snap install btop; sudo snap connect btop:removable-media

Refer to the project homepage for more details [7].

Kicking Tires

Among so many options, what makes btm special? It provides immediate and time series monitoring of CPU, memory, network activity, processes, and disk usage like other tools, but it does it with characteristic flair. An interesting example is found in the six pre-built color themes, their styles ranging from ice blue to retro-groovy cool. The default color scheme is selected when no selection is made, but you can see a few of the alternative choices available in Figure 1. Nothing should stop you from creating your own template if you do not

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