htop

Judgement

What it is

Developer tool

What it does

An interactive terminal process viewer showing CPU, memory and load, with sorting, filtering, tree view and the ability to kill or renice processes.

Adopt it when

You administer Linux, BSD or macOS machines and want a clearer view than top, available in nearly every package repository.

Ready for

Production-ready

Runs as

Command line

Built with

C and ncurses

How established

Established: started 6 years ago, latest release 3.5.3.

What the license allows

Use inside your business is unrestricted, but anything you distribute that includes it must be released under the same license.

Judged on 2026-11-06 from the project's README and GitHub data. The license and age lines are worked out directly.

Built from

Follow it down: htop → GCC → LLVM project → runs on a microchip

How compilers were built, back to punched paper tape

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