Ability to kill any process with ease (using F9).

List ongoing processes in a tree manner.

So let's have a look at what are those features that are lacking in the top utility and are available in htop: While htop made its debut in 2004, you are expected to have more features. So you will have to follow manual installation to get your hands on the FeaturesĪs the top has been around since 1984 (even before Linux was introduced), it only comes with basic features and is still in active development. You will find the presence of top and htop in the default repository of almost every repository.īut the top comes pre-installed with every modern UNIX-like system whereas the htop does not come pre-installed in the majority of systems.

Ability to use the mouse pointer to select options with the ability to scroll through the processes.

How every core of your processor is utilized with individual progress bars.

On the other hand, the htop is completely different:Īnd here you have various advantages over the top utility as it shows the following details by default: It shows relevant info in bold and I changed the bold color to light green for better readability. This is how the top command looks like in the default settings: You guessed it right, its visual appearance. Let me start with the most noticeable change. Plain text and uses bold text to highlight information. You can press F5 and it will show ongoing processes in tree format. While htop tries to show every ongoing process.Īllows horizontal and vertical scrolling.

Puts more emphasis on showing processes that consume the most system resources. In other words, htop provides a slightly better user experience, but it's not a standard command you'll find on all Linux systems.īut before you jump to the details, here is a quick summary:Ĭomes pre-installed in every modern UNIX-like OS. htop is newer and it adds color and gives a more interactive user interface than top.

Top is the older command and it comes preinstalled on all Linux distros.

So, what's the difference between the two? Difference between top and htop They have similar names and similar objectives. Top and htop are two of the most popular command line utilities for system monitoring in Linux.

Top htop