htop is a terminal-based system resource monitor and interactive process viewer. It functions as a text-user interface dashboard for overseeing hardware temperatures, load averages, and battery status while providing a comprehensive tool for monitoring and managing system processes.
The application distinguishes itself through detailed process lifecycle management, allowing users to kill processes, adjust priorities via renicing, and assign CPU affinity to specific cores. It provides high-level visibility into system behavior through process hierarchy visualization and the ability to inspect process backtraces and environment variables.
The monitoring surface covers real-time tracking of CPU, memory, GPU, and disk I/O utilization via configurable performance meters. It includes extensive process organization capabilities, such as real-time filtering, searching, and custom column configuration to tailor the displayed system metrics.
The interface is built using a text-mode library to manage windowing and colors within a terminal emulator.
