Process monitor htop reaches version 1.0

Tree view, drawn with Unicode characters, new in htop 1.0
Source: htop

The htop project has announced the release of version 1.0 of its interactive system monitoring process viewer written for Linux and designed to replace the Unix program top. Development of htop started eight years ago and, having been stable for the last year at version 0.9, the developers felt the new features introduced warranted the version jump to it becoming 1.0.

New features in version 1.0 include support for splitting CPU meters into two or four columns, constantly updating meters, support for UTF-8 tree drawing and incremental filtering of the process list. Under the hood, the developers have improved overall performance, switched from using the now deprecated PLPA for processor affinity control to HWLOC and returned support for native Linux sched_setaffinity.

Among the ways htop differentiates itself from top is by allowing the user to scroll the process list vertically and horizontally, making it easier all processes and complete command lines. Htop also allows the user to select a process from the list, rather than type in a process id, to kill a process or change the priority value and it supports mouse operation. The developers do admit though that top is older and is more tested.

The new version, htop 1.0, is available as source code and binaries are available for most Linux distributions, and is licensed under the GPLv3.

(lcz)