The project simply has "game inspired menu system". OP, probably unaware for what gamify truly means, used this term. That said a gamified system monitor will've been quite funny project to see. "Achievement unlocked: Run out of memory!"
The poster appears to be Indian from their HN profile. How about we extend some grace for a slight misunderstanding of the nuances of a term that isn't particularly common in day to day discussions?
I see your point, but I think the anger comes from the fact that
1. the title was unneccessarily editorialized,
2. the word gamified is used wrong here, and
3. There was never any good reason to add the word gamified to the title, other than adding a buzzword.
The feedback people give is probably a bit harsh, but I find it understandable. If you don’t know what a term means, don’t use it - especially not if it’s completely unnecessary as in this case.
I used to have btop running in a stand-alone terminal, so that I could monitor my system for any weirdness, but I ended up ending the practice as btop leaks memory like crazy:
I like btop but as someone who keeps their config files under source control it's a bit annoying that anything you do in the application results in config file changes.
I kind of avoided it too, htop, bmon, iotop and nvidia-smi worked fine as it was. But eventually came across it for the Nth time and finally tried it out, it's basically all of them in one, with some nicer graphs and customization. Do I require it to do my job? No, but with it I need 3-4 tmux panes less to see the same info. Also does most of the stuff I used htop for, sorting by different things, filtering by letters and easy to kill the currently selected process.
If a text-mode process monitor is larger than about 200 KiB, then it sounds bloated to me. If it's loaded with tons of features, then my upper limit is 1 MiB.
I've been searching for something that would be able to show me all the stats I care about (cpu, memory, disk and network usage) on a single screen, and btop so far has been quite good at this role. It has a bit weird controls to my taste, but reading the manual works I guess :)
I prefer btop over more traditional resource monitor CLI/TUIs as it handles affordances in a more thoughtful and intuitive way (to me, at least - it's definitely a personal preference!). I think it's worth a test drive even just to explore a different sort of interaction mechanism for TUIs.
I really like the new wave of TUI aesthetic that's been worming its way into Linux user interfaces lately. Check out Omarchy's desktop distro if you want more of that aesthetic throughout your OS, it does a good job if that's the look and feel you want.
And I really dislike them. The nice thing about CLI is that you can compose them quite easily. You can compose your own report giving you what you want and none of what you don’t want.
And most of those TUI are badly designed in terms of configurability. Especially the ise of colors and “effects”.
Sure they have, or at least it has been tried. I think it turns out to be such a hard problem to solve that it degrades into proper programing much faster than a cli where pipes can carry hard.
Lately? Tiling window managers with open terminals running TUI programs have been the focal point in r/unixporn since ever. All looking like poor imitations of Oberon system which actually combined text/graphical interfaces.
I am all in favour of better TUIs. Omarchy unfortunately does not interest me ever since DHH decided to take more control of the ruby-ecosystem via shopify.
Which has no relation to the word gamified. So the editorialized title is misleading.
Editorialized here simply means applying editor-level changes to the title of the website to express an opinion. No deceit is implied. It is against HN guidelines unless the title is unclear or does not fit.
While I can't tell exactly what the author is thinking, the opinion that I see is that it feels a lot like a video game. The author said "game inspired menu system" which is a far cry from game-like user interface, which would be a corrected version of gamified user interface.
That does seem obviously like an opinion, however there are some things that don't seem like an opinion that can still be considered an opinion.
This fits a whole class of headlines, which are described as editorialized, some of which seem more opinionated than this and some which seem less opinionated. I'm not sure whether it's better wrangle the use of opinion and the definition of opinion to make these satisfy the dictionary definition of editorialized or accept that the use of language has evolved and it's better not to be overly prescriptive.
That isn't what gamified means, and one should not be using such a term without knowing what it means. When in doubt, stick to simpler descriptions. Hence calling it poorly editorialized.
To me, gamelike user interface would be simply editorialized, while gamified user interface would be poorly editoralized. One is editoralized with an opinion, the other also has an error. It isn't a fact that it's gamelike over all, nor is it how it's described in the README - the author says "with a game inspired menu system" which is a far cry from game-esque, game-like, game-ified, etc.
Press F2 to go to setup, then go to "Meters" on the left. Under "Available Meters" you should see "GPU usage", which can be added to the status meters at the top. Available options for format are "Bar", "Text", "Graph", and "LED".
I'm using 3.4.1, so it's possible you have an older version that doesn't have it.
I gave up on heavily customizing the UI after a couple of top variants (where I would lose said customizations for a variety of reasons) over the years so I run a fairly vanilla config: I like both the look and the information density of btop over htop out of the box.
btop is good, I like 'glances' the best though because like 'atop' it actually highlights whatever problem is most likely to be causing lag at the moment, and it breaks out docker containers into a separate section and labels them properly.
btop is more colorful and a bit prettier. It has different color themes and it’s easy to open and close different views (network, memory, system processes, storage, etc). Not sure if there’s any real functional advantage though.
This is quite cool, but I do have to nitpick the weird titlebars on the sections. For some reason the top lines bend down to meet the titles and create clutter, in an already cluttered interface.
i always press z, x, c, s, 1, <enter> and shift+w to save. I used to color code different servers, but there's only so many combos (like 5) that are easy to read.
btop is my default resources monitor and I really like it, but calling it "gamified"?? you are tracking memory and cpu usage, it doesn't have to be fun
I mean you're right, profiling is always one of the funniest part to me because it's one of the most creative. You know you have a defined mark to beat and is up to you the strategy you take to achieve that. But it's what you can do with those metrics and knowledge what's fun, not the metrics themselves!
This is exactly my go to. Monitoring and visualization in Btop and killing the process in htop. It makes it so much easier searching a process with a shortcut instead of navigating the TUI in btop to search
Too much voodoo as Terry says. People are so lost and pinned-in—like a free-range prison. Riceing the computer helps take your mind off of it for a bit.
I appreciate that people use the new features in C++23, but I don't like that what's supposed to be a very basic system utility relies on compilers not available except in the newest of distributions. I mean, sure, you can also download and build a modern C++ compiler, but I would have swallowed my pride and written it using somewhat older C++. I maintain a GPU-related C++ library which assumes C++11 and no later - even if C++17 constexpr goodness would have made some of it easier to write.
Windows Task Manager is already gamified. You find the process you want to kill, then it starts jumping around and you can't click it. You try to find it by typing, but there are 20 other processes with that name that are selected first. So fun.
Not the same kind of monitor tool exactly, but, I keep finding dstat hard to leave behind. Because I can see the past there! So many of these monitors have one or two or three over time graphs, but most of the information is ephemeral, only shows right now. But I really want to see network use, disk use, paging, context switching/interrupts over time!
There is also Below. Which has a much more htop/btop like interface than dstat. Below records system info over time, and allows time travel! However, it's not as convenient as dstat, not at a glance, as one has to to scrub through time. But it is pretty impressive system monitoring, great for what it is! It's per-process pressure metrics are also utterly unbeatable. The way it rolls up cgroups is also stellar.
https://github.com/facebookincubator/below
I’m a btop user how is it gamified? If by “gamified” thy mean “looks like something you would see in a video game (or movie)” then yeah tha tracks but that’s not what “gamified” typically means…
It’s not a process monitor, really, but to me the AWS Lightsail monitor tab feels like this. The “sustainable” line hits me right in the OCD to keep me grinding on cpu usage of the workload to keep extra spend at zero.
haha, triple simultaneous posts.... but that doom kill game isn't really the same as gamifying resource management. I would really want to see a gamified process monitor as well.
Page title is -
btop: A monitor of resources
As per HN guidelines [0] -
> Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
i dont think they could have possibly chosen a word to make me want to use it less than gamified.
The project simply has "game inspired menu system". OP, probably unaware for what gamify truly means, used this term. That said a gamified system monitor will've been quite funny project to see. "Achievement unlocked: Run out of memory!"
There was something years ago, Doom, but all the monsters were PIDs. If you wanted a process dead, you shot it.
psDooM. It's still available https://psdoom.sourceforge.net/download.html
GPU at 90°C: New high score!
Title should be a textbook example of language misuse.
The poster appears to be Indian from their HN profile. How about we extend some grace for a slight misunderstanding of the nuances of a term that isn't particularly common in day to day discussions?
I see your point, but I think the anger comes from the fact that
1. the title was unneccessarily editorialized, 2. the word gamified is used wrong here, and 3. There was never any good reason to add the word gamified to the title, other than adding a buzzword.
The feedback people give is probably a bit harsh, but I find it understandable. If you don’t know what a term means, don’t use it - especially not if it’s completely unnecessary as in this case.
Indians have exhausted our grace
Nowhere on the GitHub page does the project describe itself as "gamified", it's just the title of the HN submission
It's not obviously the project's choice itself. See thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45857774
Would a mention of loot boxes move you?
agree
I used to have btop running in a stand-alone terminal, so that I could monitor my system for any weirdness, but I ended up ending the practice as btop leaks memory like crazy:
https://github.com/aristocratos/btop/issues/912
It wasn't uncommon for gigabytes of ram getting taken up after a day or two of uptime
i have had the current packaged debian version running for a couple of months on a server next to my desk. no memory issues here.
I like btop but as someone who keeps their config files under source control it's a bit annoying that anything you do in the application results in config file changes.
htop does the same and it is indeed annoying!
My htop file is read only. But it’s silly that you need to do that.
"Linux binaries for each architecture are statically linked with musl". Love to see this! The binary is 2.6MB and runs great.
I don't know if this will replace htop for me. The main feature seems to be 24 bit color and some aggressive styling. I'm too old fashioned for that.
> I don't know if this will replace htop for me
I kind of avoided it too, htop, bmon, iotop and nvidia-smi worked fine as it was. But eventually came across it for the Nth time and finally tried it out, it's basically all of them in one, with some nicer graphs and customization. Do I require it to do my job? No, but with it I need 3-4 tmux panes less to see the same info. Also does most of the stuff I used htop for, sorting by different things, filtering by letters and easy to kill the currently selected process.
If a text-mode process monitor is larger than about 200 KiB, then it sounds bloated to me. If it's loaded with tons of features, then my upper limit is 1 MiB.
It's slowly growing on me too. Htop is defined in my muscle memory, but more and more of my systems now have btop installed as well..
there was a time when we all reached for justplain top by default and it managed to get replaced by htop (:
I've been searching for something that would be able to show me all the stats I care about (cpu, memory, disk and network usage) on a single screen, and btop so far has been quite good at this role. It has a bit weird controls to my taste, but reading the manual works I guess :)
I prefer btop over more traditional resource monitor CLI/TUIs as it handles affordances in a more thoughtful and intuitive way (to me, at least - it's definitely a personal preference!). I think it's worth a test drive even just to explore a different sort of interaction mechanism for TUIs.
I've written up some thoughts on the design of btop here: https://abstractnonsense.xyz/micro-blog/2025-04-26-btop-of-y...
I really like the new wave of TUI aesthetic that's been worming its way into Linux user interfaces lately. Check out Omarchy's desktop distro if you want more of that aesthetic throughout your OS, it does a good job if that's the look and feel you want.
And I really dislike them. The nice thing about CLI is that you can compose them quite easily. You can compose your own report giving you what you want and none of what you don’t want.
And most of those TUI are badly designed in terms of configurability. Especially the ise of colors and “effects”.
TUI and CLI are not the same thing. TUI is a GUI, and GUIs have never been composable.
> and GUIs have never been composable.
Sure they have, or at least it has been tried. I think it turns out to be such a hard problem to solve that it degrades into proper programing much faster than a cli where pipes can carry hard.
Some examples:
The first xerox alto interface.
smalltalk
Microsofts OLE
I think they understand that. They're saying they dislike TUIs and prefer CLIs because CLIs are composable.
Lately? Tiling window managers with open terminals running TUI programs have been the focal point in r/unixporn since ever. All looking like poor imitations of Oberon system which actually combined text/graphical interfaces.
Btop really captures that '90s warez group feel.
Me too. It make it a lot easier to filter out the kids.
I am all in favour of better TUIs. Omarchy unfortunately does not interest me ever since DHH decided to take more control of the ruby-ecosystem via shopify.
What about btop is gamified?
I don't know if this is the official answer but if you've ever played DOOM and pressed Esc then you'll feel right at home using btop!
Compare with: Apart from that, there are not other gaming mechanics.You get 50 points for every process you kill.
Haha. Joke, right? Please?
PsDooM: https://psdoom.sourceforge.net/
Also fsdoom: https://dos.itch.io/fsdoom
I just hit 10,000! Honestly, though: The respawn rate is too fast for some of these mobs.
Poor editorialized title.
Poor editorialized title.
"Editorialized" implied deceit was intended. It looks to me like the submitter was trying to be descriptive.
The very first item in the feature list is
> Easy to use, with a game inspired menu system.
Which has no relation to the word gamified. So the editorialized title is misleading.
Editorialized here simply means applying editor-level changes to the title of the website to express an opinion. No deceit is implied. It is against HN guidelines unless the title is unclear or does not fit.
right? that is not gamification. there's no reward system to make one want progression, or addiction.
that said a enjoy looking at code for projects that are multi os so cheers for op.
Editorialized simply means expressing an opinion (as in an editorial). The word has no connotation implying deceit.
No one was, nor was implied to be, deceptive. They described it in their own words and the word they chose is clearly inaccurate or misused.
That's all.
They could have described it as "game-like design" or something else.
Merriam-Webster defines editorialized as "to introduce opinion into the reporting of facts"
It was the submitter's opinion that "gamified" was an accurate description for this page instead of using the actual title of the page.
So while "editorialized" is a little formal, it is correct.
Reporting on controversial issues is often editorialized, which may be where your feeling that it relates to deceit is coming from.
While I can't tell exactly what the author is thinking, the opinion that I see is that it feels a lot like a video game. The author said "game inspired menu system" which is a far cry from game-like user interface, which would be a corrected version of gamified user interface.
That does seem obviously like an opinion, however there are some things that don't seem like an opinion that can still be considered an opinion.
This fits a whole class of headlines, which are described as editorialized, some of which seem more opinionated than this and some which seem less opinionated. I'm not sure whether it's better wrangle the use of opinion and the definition of opinion to make these satisfy the dictionary definition of editorialized or accept that the use of language has evolved and it's better not to be overly prescriptive.
taking inspiration from a game doesn’t mean “gamified”.
Just like editing a title doesn't mean "editorialized".
That isn't what gamified means, and one should not be using such a term without knowing what it means. When in doubt, stick to simpler descriptions. Hence calling it poorly editorialized.
Hence calling it poorly editorialized.
"Poorly described" would be correct. "Editorialized" does not mean what you think it means. See my previous comment.
To me, gamelike user interface would be simply editorialized, while gamified user interface would be poorly editoralized. One is editoralized with an opinion, the other also has an error. It isn't a fact that it's gamelike over all, nor is it how it's described in the README - the author says "with a game inspired menu system" which is a far cry from game-esque, game-like, game-ified, etc.
If you miss the quick time event it SIGKILLs PID1
btop is my default 'top' these days, has everything htop/top provides plus it shows the usage of GPUs.
htop has GPU usage too, it's just not at the top by default.
are you sure about that? how? I could not find the magic button to show gpu yet.
Press F2 to go to setup, then go to "Meters" on the left. Under "Available Meters" you should see "GPU usage", which can be added to the status meters at the top. Available options for format are "Bar", "Text", "Graph", and "LED".
I'm using 3.4.1, so it's possible you have an older version that doesn't have it.
Seems to only be "Current GPU utilization", as far as I can tell.
btop in contrast, currently shows me: GPU utilization (graph/historic+current), clock speed, power-state, power usage, encoding/decoding utilization, VRAM frequency, VRAM bandwidth utilization (graph+current) + VRAM total/free usage and finally the current transmit/receive rate to/from VRAM.
Yeah, it's not as detailed for sure. You can set it to show a graph of GPU utilization over the last minute or so, but that's about it.
ubuntu 24.04 had version 1.3.0, not there yet.
I recently found out https://github.com/ClementTsang/bottom#readme (cargo install bottom; executable btm), it's a pretty great improvement over htop I was using before.
You get this for free if you upgrade to Debian 12. It's in the repos.
It’s free anyway
I prefer [bottom](https://github.com/ClementTsang/bottom)
I love btop. It's missing a few things I like from my rainmeter setup.
- per physical core clock next to the per core temperature and usage
- multiple top subwindows that can each be sorted by different things (it's nice to see who's hogging CPU, memory, and GPU)
- more UPS / battery support, namely hooks into power usage
Anyone have strong feelings on htop, btop, bottom, etc?
I have used htop forever, but would be happy to hear of a compelling reason to switch.
I gave up on heavily customizing the UI after a couple of top variants (where I would lose said customizations for a variety of reasons) over the years so I run a fairly vanilla config: I like both the look and the information density of btop over htop out of the box.
btop is good, I like 'glances' the best though because like 'atop' it actually highlights whatever problem is most likely to be causing lag at the moment, and it breaks out docker containers into a separate section and labels them properly.
I have a few more listed + notes on them here: https://docs.sweeting.me/s/system-monitoring-tools#All-in-on...
btop is more colorful and a bit prettier. It has different color themes and it’s easy to open and close different views (network, memory, system processes, storage, etc). Not sure if there’s any real functional advantage though.
I wouldn’t call it “gamified” but I do love btop. the one thing missing for me is GPU usage on MacOS (I use asitop for that)
Does anyone know the difference? I have been using htop since about 20 years.
Is btop basically just extending where it can run?
Lots of quality of life changes. Maybe some of them can be done in htop but with btop it's right in your face:
- CPU usage graph (global and per cpu)
- CPU temp + graph
- GPU usage
- Memory graphs
- Disks space infos + real-time IO
- Network graph, one for each network device, upload/download stats since opening the app
- Per program cpu graph, memory graph
You should try it.
I switched because btop provides vi-like keybindings. For htop I think you have to use a fork to get that.
Enhanced stats reporting really. Shows you processes, network throughput et cetera.
This is quite cool, but I do have to nitpick the weird titlebars on the sections. For some reason the top lines bend down to meet the titles and create clutter, in an already cluttered interface.
> modern alternative
Anyone remember top? I was so happy to switch to htop that had colors!
Just press z in top for glorious colour.
Oh wow, I never knew! Guess I never read the manpage either.
Try B for bold, 1 to expand/collapse CPUs. And finally save the config file with W.
https://xkcd.com/1053/
i always press z, x, c, s, 1, <enter> and shift+w to save. I used to color code different servers, but there's only so many combos (like 5) that are easy to read.
And htop is still good enough.
I like the idea of having IO integrated. I have trouble remembering the iotop flags and often run it in a parallel window.
htop shows IO usage too if your version is recent enough. Tab.
Ooh thanks!
users: more dots
btop: done
btop is my default resources monitor and I really like it, but calling it "gamified"?? you are tracking memory and cpu usage, it doesn't have to be fun
I think it’s fun! (But yeah, it’s not “gamified”. That’s just a clickbait word)
I mean you're right, profiling is always one of the funniest part to me because it's one of the most creative. You know you have a defined mark to beat and is up to you the strategy you take to achieve that. But it's what you can do with those metrics and knowledge what's fun, not the metrics themselves!
Does it consume more resources than the processes it is monitoring?
My favorite part about btop is how smooth the color gradient is from the top of the process list to the bottom. Soooo smooooth…
It’s pretty, but I’m a die hard htop fan. Watching and killing processes just doesn’t seem as simple in btop.
I agree but btop does have better visualizations. Htop is better for actually killing processes.
This is exactly my go to. Monitoring and visualization in Btop and killing the process in htop. It makes it so much easier searching a process with a shortcut instead of navigating the TUI in btop to search
Too much voodoo as Terry says. People are so lost and pinned-in—like a free-range prison. Riceing the computer helps take your mind off of it for a bit.
Waiting for neobtop++ to output a full GUI system monitor using sixels.
I appreciate that people use the new features in C++23, but I don't like that what's supposed to be a very basic system utility relies on compilers not available except in the newest of distributions. I mean, sure, you can also download and build a modern C++ compiler, but I would have swallowed my pride and written it using somewhat older C++. I maintain a GPU-related C++ library which assumes C++11 and no later - even if C++17 constexpr goodness would have made some of it easier to write.
Windows Task Manager is already gamified. You find the process you want to kill, then it starts jumping around and you can't click it. You try to find it by typing, but there are 20 other processes with that name that are selected first. So fun.
use btop daily; works great; also works for killing processes (you get bonus points for each killed process :p )
Not the same kind of monitor tool exactly, but, I keep finding dstat hard to leave behind. Because I can see the past there! So many of these monitors have one or two or three over time graphs, but most of the information is ephemeral, only shows right now. But I really want to see network use, disk use, paging, context switching/interrupts over time!
There is also Below. Which has a much more htop/btop like interface than dstat. Below records system info over time, and allows time travel! However, it's not as convenient as dstat, not at a glance, as one has to to scrub through time. But it is pretty impressive system monitoring, great for what it is! It's per-process pressure metrics are also utterly unbeatable. The way it rolls up cgroups is also stellar. https://github.com/facebookincubator/below
I’m a btop user how is it gamified? If by “gamified” thy mean “looks like something you would see in a video game (or movie)” then yeah tha tracks but that’s not what “gamified” typically means…
This makes me want to see an actually gamified process monitor. Maybe it's a game where you gain points by reducing resource consumption
Here it is! Using the classic doom https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/
There was that version of `kill` that you interfaced with by playing Doom...
It’s not a process monitor, really, but to me the AWS Lightsail monitor tab feels like this. The “sustainable” line hits me right in the OCD to keep me grinding on cpu usage of the workload to keep extra spend at zero.
haha, triple simultaneous posts.... but that doom kill game isn't really the same as gamifying resource management. I would really want to see a gamified process monitor as well.
Here you go!
https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/
I was expecting to see achievements, gambling and speculative markets for loot boxes.
I was also incredibly confused how one would gamify a process monitor. Anyone remember psdoom?
This is not that, but… honestly I don't think I want a game-menu-UIfied top either. Most games' UI is barely tolerable…
(Ed.: looks like it's just poor titling in the HN submission)
My goodness, it's written in a non-memory safe language! /s
I bet the Rust boys are contemplating a rewrite already.
https://github.com/ClementTsang/bottom