Htop Advanced Process Viewer

Install htop

# Ubuntu/Debian
sudo apt install htop

# macOS
brew install htop

Launch htop

htop

Navigation shortcuts

• F1 or h - Help
• F2 or S - Setup
• F3 or / - Search
• F4 or \ - Filter
• F5 or t - Tree view
• F6 or < > - Sort by column
• F9 or k - Kill process
• F10 or q - Quit

Sorting

• M - Sort by memory usage
• P - Sort by CPU usage
• T - Sort by time
• N - Sort by PID

Display options

• H - Toggle user threads
• K - Toggle kernel threads
• u - Filter by user
• Space - Tag process
• U - Untag all
• c - Tag all children

Tree view

• t - Toggle tree view
• + - Expand tree
• - - Collapse tree

Process management

• k - Kill process (sends SIGTERM)
• F9 - Kill menu (choose signal)
• e - Show process environment
• l - List open files (lsof)
• s - Trace syscalls (strace)

Common signals

1  - SIGHUP   (Reload configuration)
2  - SIGINT   (Interrupt, Ctrl+C)
9  - SIGKILL  (Force kill)
15 - SIGTERM  (Graceful termination)
18 - SIGCONT  (Continue if stopped)
19 - SIGSTOP  (Pause process)

Filtering

Press F4 then type:

nginx       # Show only nginx processes
USER=www    # Show processes by user
STATE=R     # Show only running processes

Color schemes

Press F2 > Colors > Choose theme:

• Monochrome
• Black on White
• Light Terminal
• MC (Midnight Commander)
• Black Night

Display meters

Press F2 > Meters:

• Add/remove meters
• Customize layout
• CPU, Memory, Swap meters
• Load average, Uptime

Configuration file

Located at ~/.config/htop/htoprc

View specific user

htop -u username

Batch mode (non-interactive)

htop --no-color --no-mouse

CPU affinity

• a - Set CPU affinity
• Select which CPUs process can use

Process priority

• F7 - Decrease priority (nice)
• F8 - Increase priority (nice)

Useful display modes

• I - Invert sort order
• p - Show full paths
• g - Merge all branches

Monitor specific PID

htop -p 1234,5678

Show command line arguments

• c - Show full command line