The Free Unix Process Viewer

Htop is a cross platform Unix monitoring programme which is free to download in two forms. It offers a highly interactive process viewer for all Unix systems.

Track Processes as They Happen

The recent releases of Htop have included code support for a wide range of operating systems including Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and Apple’s OS X. This makes it a powerful tool for anyone used to Unix functionality and who wishes to monitor what is going on at any particular time. As a freely available utility, it is put together professionally with bug fixes being handled well. Htop is a text-mode programme and can be used for various functions, such as viewing the CPU average meter in its graph mode, for instance, or for configuring I/O scheduling priorities. The programme’s colour schemes are configurable by users and the system’s graphs have been updated to use Braille Unicode characters which makes the software more visually appealing. Accessing the available set of environment variables for a process is easy with a single key operation. The software is written in C and uses the ncurses library. It is published under a GNU general public license.

Unix Processing Monitoring

Thanks to the addition of some GUI elements in the latest versions of Htop, the display is more user-friendly than ever before. It is a useful tool for any Unix users who have a degree of technical ability.