How to Install and Use Bashtop: The Ultimate Linux Resource Monitor

Bashtop is a terminal‑based resource‑monitoring utility for Linux that provides a visually appealing, game‑style responsive UI with customizable menus, making it easy to monitor CPU, memory, processes, bandwidth and other system metrics.

It allows sorting processes, switching between sorting options, and sending signals such as SIGKILL , SIGTERM and SIGINT to selected processes.

Bashtop can be installed on Linux, macOS and FreeBSD. The following guide shows how to install it on various Linux distributions.

Prerequisites

To install Bashtop successfully, ensure the following dependencies are present:

Bash 4.4 or newer

Git

GNU Coreutils

GNU sed, awk, grep and ps utilities

Lm‑sensor (optional, for CPU temperature)

Manual installation

Clone the repository and compile from source:

$ git clone https://github.com/aristocratos/bashtop.git
$ cd bashtop
$ sudo make install

To uninstall, run:

$ sudo make uninstall

Installing Bashtop on Ubuntu

Two methods are available: using snap or the APT package manager.

Snap installation:

$ snap install bashtop

APT installation (requires adding the PPA first):

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bashtop-monitor/bashtop
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install bashtop

Installing Bashtop on Debian

Bashtop is in the official Debian repository:

$ sudo apt install bashtop

Alternatively, build from source:

$ git clone https://github.com/aristocratos/bashtop.git
$ cd bashtop/
$ cd DEB
$ sudo ./build

Installing Bashtop on Fedora

$ sudo dnf install bashtop

Installing Bashtop on CentOS / RHEL 8

Enable the EPEL repository first, then install:

$ sudo yum install epel-release
$ sudo dnf install bashtop

Installing Bashtop on Arch Linux

Bashtop is available in the AUR as bashtop-git:

$ sudo pacman -S bashtop

Using Bashtop

Start the monitor with:

$ bashtop

Configuration

The configuration file is located at ~/.config/bashtop/bashtop.cfg. You can edit parameters to customize the appearance and output of metrics.

Example of the default configuration (screenshot):

Press Esc and navigate to Help to view commands and shortcuts.

Conclusion

Bashtop offers an excellent way to monitor Linux system resources, though it is slower and more resource‑intensive than top or htop. Nevertheless, it provides impressive visual feedback and valuable information about various system metrics.