gotop

gotop is a system activity monitor that runs entirely inside a terminal window, displaying live charts and graphs for CPU usage, memory, disk activity, network traffic, and running processes. Instead of opening a separate application with a graphical interface, you run gotop from the command line and get an updating visual dashboard made of text-based graphics directly in your terminal.

Important note from the README: this original repository is no longer maintained. A community-maintained fork exists at a separate GitHub location, and that fork is where active development continues. The code here is archived.

On the display, you can scroll through the list of running processes, sort them by CPU usage, memory usage, or process ID, and kill a selected process directly from the interface. The keyboard shortcuts follow a Vim-style layout, meaning j/k move the cursor down and up, and gg jumps to the top of the list. Mouse scrolling and clicking also work for navigating processes.

Installation options include downloading a prebuilt binary (no additional programming tools required), installing from package managers on macOS via Homebrew, on Arch Linux via AUR, on FreeBSD via pkg, or via Snap. Building from source requires the Go programming language.

Command-line flags let you customize the display: show each CPU core separately, show only CPU, memory, and process widgets for a minimal view, display a battery level indicator, adjust how frequently the readings update, or pick a specific network interface to monitor. Custom color schemes are supported by placing a JSON file in a config directory and referencing it by name at launch.

The project works on Linux, macOS, and FreeBSD. OpenBSD works with some limitations. Windows support was planned but not completed.