Index

News

22 September 2024

Btop release v1.4.0

Intel GPU support added, note that only GPU utilization, power usage and clock speed available to monitor. Thanks to @bjia56 for contributions.

NetBSD support added. Thanks to @fraggerfox for contributions.

See CHANGELOG.md and latest release for detailed list of new features, bug fixes and new themes.

7 January 2024

Btop release v1.3.0

Big release with GPU support added for Linux and platform support for OpenBSD. Big thanks to @romner-set (GPU support) and @joske (OpenBSD support) for contributions. And a multitude of bugfixes and small changes, see CHANGELOG.md and latest release for detailed list and attributions.

See news entry below for more information regarding GPU support.

25 November 2023

GPU monitoring added for Linux!

Compile from git main to try it out.

Use keys 5, 6, 7 and 0 to show/hide the gpu monitoring boxes. 5 = Gpu 1, 6 = Gpu 2, etc.

Gpu stats/graphs can also be displayed in the "Cpu box" (not as verbose), see the cpu options menu for info and configuration.

Note that the binaries provided on the release page (when released) and the continuous builds will not have gpu support enabled.

Because the GPU support relies on loading of dynamic gpu libraries, gpu support will not work when also static linking.

See Compilation Linux for more info on how to compile with gpu monitoring support.

Many thanks to @romner-set who wrote the vast majority of the implementation for GPU support.

Big update with version bump to 1.3 coming soon.

28 August 2022

First release of btop4win available at https://github.com/aristocratos/btop4win

# Install and use Homebrew or MacPorts package managers for easy dependency installation
brew install coreutils make gcc@11 lowdown
git clone https://github.com/aristocratos/btop.git
cd btop
git checkout OSX
gmake

sudo pkg install gmake gcc11 coreutils git lowdown
git clone https://github.com/aristocratos/btop.git
cd btop
git checkout freebsd
gmake

Documents

CHANGELOG.md

CONTRIBUTING.md

CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md

Description

Resource monitor that shows usage and stats for processor, memory, disks, network and processes.

C++ version and continuation of bashtop and bpytop.

Features

• Easy to use, with a game inspired menu system.
• Full mouse support: all buttons with a highlighted key are clickable and mouse scrolling works in process list and menu boxes.
• Fast and responsive UI with UP, DOWN key process selection.
• Function for showing detailed stats for selected process.
• Ability to filter processes.
• Easy switching between sorting options.
• Tree view of processes.
• Send any signal to selected process.
• Pause the process list.
• UI menu for changing all config file options.
• Auto scaling graph for network usage.
• Shows IO activity and speeds for disks.
• Battery meter
• Selectable symbols for the graphs.
• Custom presets
• And more...

Themes

Btop++ uses the same theme files as bpytop and bashtop (some color values missing in bashtop themes).

See themes folder for available themes.

Btop searches the following directories for system themes:

• ../share/btop/themes (this path is relative to the btop executable)
• /usr/local/share/btop/themes
• /usr/share/btop/themes

The first directory that exists and isn't empty is used as the system themes directory.

The user themes directory depends on which environment variables are set:

• If $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is set, the user themes directory is $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/btop/themes
• Otherwise, if $HOME is set, the user themes directory is $HOME/.config/btop/themes
• Otherwise, the user themes directory is ~/.config/btop/themes

The make install command places the default themes in [$PREFIX or /usr/local]/share/btop/themes. User created themes should be placed in the user themes directory.

Let me know if you want to contribute with new themes.

Support and funding

You can sponsor this project through GitHub. See my sponsors page for options.

Or donate through PayPal or ko-fi.

Any support is greatly appreciated!

Prerequisites

For the best experience run within a terminal with support for:

• 24-bit truecolor (See list of terminals with truecolor support)
• 256-color terminals are supported through 24-bit to 256-color conversion when setting "truecolor" to False in the options or with "-lc/--low-color" arguments.
• 16 color TTY mode will be activated if a real tty device is detected. Can be forced with "-t/--tty" arguments.
• Wide characters (Are sometimes problematic in web-based terminals)

Also necessary is a UTF8 locale and a font that includes:

• Unicode Block “Braille Patterns” U+2800 - U+28FF (Not needed in TTY mode or with graphs set to type: block or tty.)
• Unicode Block “Geometric Shapes” U+25A0 - U+25FF
• Unicode Block "Box Drawing" and "Block Elements" U+2500 - U+259F

Optional Dependencies (Needed for GPU monitoring) (Only Linux)

GPU monitoring also requires a btop binary built with GPU support (GPU_SUPPORT=true flag).

See GPU compatibility section for more about compiling with GPU support.

• NVIDIA

  If you have an NVIDIA GPU you must use an official NVIDIA driver, both the closed-source and open-source ones have been verified to work.

  In addition to that you must also have the nvidia-ml dynamic library installed, which should be included with the driver package of your distribution.

• AMD

  If you have an AMD GPU rocm_smi_lib is required, which may or may not be packaged for your distribution.

• INTEL

  Requires a working C compiler if compiling from source.

  Also requires the user to have permission to read from SYSFS.

  Can be set with make setcap (preferred) or make setuid or by running btop with sudo or equivalent.

Notice (Text rendering issues)

• If you are having problems with the characters in the graphs not looking like they do in the screenshots, it's likely a problem with your systems configured fallback font not having support for braille characters.

• See Terminess Powerline for an example of a font that includes the braille symbols.

• See comments by @sgleizes link and @XenHat link in issue #100 for possible solutions.

• If text is misaligned and you use Konsole or Yakuake, turning off "Bi-Directional text rendering" is a possible fix.

• Characters clipping into each other or text/border misalignments are not bugs caused by btop, but most likely a fontconfig or terminal problem where the braille characters making up the graphs aren't rendered correctly.

• Look to the creators of the terminal emulator you use to fix these issues if the previously mentioned fixes don't work for you.

Screenshots

Main UI showing details for a selected process

Main UI in TTY mode

Main UI with custom options

Main-menu

Options-menu

Help-menu

Installation

Binaries for Linux are statically compiled with musl and work on kernel releases 2.6.39 and newer

1. Download btop-(VERSION)-(ARCH)-(PLATFORM).tbz from latest release and unpack to a new folder

   Notice! Use x86_64 for 64-bit x86 systems, i486 and i686 are 32-bit!

2. Install (from created folder)

   • Run:

   # use "make install PREFIX=/target/dir" to set target, default: /usr/local
   # only use "sudo" when installing to a NON user owned directory
   sudo make install

3. (Optional/Required for Intel GPU and CPU wattage) Set extended capabilities or suid bit to btop

   Enables signal sending to any process without starting with sudo and can prevent /proc read permissions problems on some systems.

   Is required for Intel GPU support and CPU wattage monitoring.

   • Run:

   # run after make install and use same PREFIX if any was used at install
   sudo make setcap

   • or

   # run after make install and use same PREFIX if any was used at install
   # set SU_USER and SU_GROUP to select user and group, default is root:root
   sudo make setuid

• Uninstall

  • Run:

  sudo make uninstall

• Show help

  make help

Binary release (from native os repo)

• openSUSE
  • Tumbleweed:

    sudo zypper in btop

  • For all other versions, see openSUSE Software: btop
• Fedora

  sudo dnf install btop

• RHEL/Rocky/AlmaLinux 8+

  sudo dnf install epel-release
  sudo dnf install btop

• FreeBSD

   pkg install btop

• NetBSD

   pkg_add btop

Binary release on Homebrew (macOS (x86_64 & ARM64) / Linux (x86_64))

• Homebrew

  brew install btop

Compilation Linux

Requires at least GCC 14 or Clang 19.

The Makefile also needs GNU coreutils and sed (should already be installed on any modern distribution).

GPU compatibility

Btop++ supports Nvidia and AMD GPUs and Intel IGPUs out of the box on Linux x86_64, provided you have the correct drivers and libraries.

Gpu support for Nvidia or AMD will not work when static linking glibc (or musl, etc.)!

For x86_64 Linux the flag GPU_SUPPORT is automatically set to true, to manually disable gpu support set the flag to false, like:

make GPU_SUPPORT=false (or cmake -DBTOP_GPU=false with CMake)

• NVIDIA

  You must use an official NVIDIA driver, both the closed-source and open-source ones have been verified to work.

  In addition to that you must also have the nvidia-ml dynamic library installed, which should be included with the driver package of your distribution.

• AMD

  AMDGPU data is queried using the ROCm SMI library, which may or may not be packaged for your distribution. If your distribution doesn't provide a package, btop++ is statically linked to ROCm SMI with the RSMI_STATIC=true make flag.

  This flag expects the ROCm SMI source code in lib/rocm_smi_lib, and compilation will fail if it's not there. The latest tested version is 5.6.x, which can be obtained with the following command:

  git clone https://github.com/rocm/rocm_smi_lib.git --depth 1 -b rocm-5.6.x lib/rocm_smi_lib