Underappreciated top
friendo.monster

Always thought top was one of those programs frozen in time since the 70s, but apparently, it has a feature set comparable to htop and the like. The default configuration just doesn’t show much of it…

  • Papamousse@beehaw.org
    4·
    4 hours ago

    I am using top for a long time, when I log on a system to check thing, I always type “s 1” to refresh 1 second, “e” to display in mb, “shift e” if top is not in mb, “c” to toggle name/command line, then “W” to save

  • alteredEnvoy@sopuli.xyz
    8·
    9 hours ago

    I wish the author can just share a configuration file. I am not configuring this on all my machines manually.

  • Eager Eagle@lemmy.worldEnglish
    20·
    14 hours ago

    Why are good features never made defaults in some tools? We can make it look almost like htop and it feels like the defaults couldn’t be worse. It’s such a waste to hide good features behind bad defaults.

    • Ephera@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      10·
      10 hours ago

      Yeah, I especially don’t understand it here, because it’s a graphical tool. You don’t have to keep backwards compatibility.

      Even if you’re worried about people depending on the format that’s being piped, you could keep only the piped format stable. We have the technology.

  • paequ2@lemmy.today
    34·
    16 hours ago

    Wow. wat. This is top??

    top

    The only reason I use htop is because I never bothered to learn top. I’m totally down to avoid downloading and installing another utility though. The time to learn top is TODAY!

    • Ephera@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      8·
      15 hours ago

      Yeah, I would often just grab htop because I had no idea how to read the CPU usage out of top.
      For example, for me it says:

      %Cpu(s):  0,4 us,  0,4 sy,  0,0 ni, 98,8 id,  0,0 wa,  0,3 hi,  0,0 si,  0,0 st

      Now that I look at it, I can guess that us and sy are supposed to be user and system time. And I guess id is supposed to be idle.
      I have no guess what the other numbers might be, though. And well, I would often like to see the CPU usage per core.
      Now I know that I can just press 1t and get effectively the same view as in htop.

      I might learn top’s filtering workflow, too. But so far, I always killed processes with ps -ef | grep <process-name> and then kill <pid>, which isn’t particularly more cumbersome, so will see…

      • utopiah@lemmy.ml
        2·
        2 hours ago

        I always killed processes with ps -ef | grep <process-name> and then kill <pid>

        you could check pgrep <process-name> too

        • Ephera@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
          2·
          2 hours ago

          That is a good tip. Unfortunately, I am too fish to understand it. 🙃

          I just type ps and in 9 out of 10 cases, my shell suggests ps -ef | grep <process-name>. So, it’s actually less for me to type than “pgrep”…

        • Ephera@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
          1·
          4 hours ago

          Ah, that was a brainfart. I do use pkill primarily. I just use the other command, when I’m not sure what the process is called…

      • IsoKiero@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        3·
        8 hours ago

        I always killed processes with ps -ef | grep <process-name>

        From top man-page global commands:

        • k :Kill-a-task

               You will be prompted for a PID and then the signal to send.
      • Shadow@lemmy.ca
        9·
        14 hours ago

        Wa is IO Wait. CPU time burned spent waiting for disk

        Hi is hardware irq, similar concept but for hardware devices.

  • Ŝan@piefed.zipEnglish
    73·
    16 hours ago

    It’s not as fancy. No graphs, blinking lights, paneled layout.

    I maintain one of þose fancy nu-tops, and I keep it running for þe pretty… but when I want to get work done, I always end up opening top. Because in þe end, columns of text are almost always more useful þan histograms.