Master Linux Process Monitoring with htop: Install, Features, and Usage

htop

is an interactive real‑time process monitoring application for Linux/Unix systems, serving as a more user‑friendly alternative to the traditional top command and often pre‑installed on Linux distributions.

htop offers many features unavailable in top , such as vertical and horizontal scrolling of the full process list, immediate data display without waiting at startup, killing multiple processes without entering PIDs, renicing processes without specifying values, printing environment variables with the e key, and mouse‑based selection.

Installing htop on Linux

The htop package is available in the default repositories of most modern Linux distributions and can be installed with the system package manager.

Debian / Ubuntu / Linux Mint

$ sudo apt install htop

Fedora

$ sudo dnf install htop

CentOS 7/8

$ sudo yum install epel-release
$ sudo yum install htop

RHEL 7/8

$ sudo yum -y install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-8.noarch.rpm
$ sudo yum install htop

Rocky Linux / AlmaLinux

$ sudo yum install epel-release
$ sudo yum install htop

Gentoo

$ emerge sys-process/htop

Arch Linux

$ pacman -S htop

OpenSUSE

$ sudo zypper install htop

Building from source

$ wget -O htop-3.0.5.tar.gz https://github.com/htop-dev/htop/archive/refs/tags/3.0.5.tar.gz
$ tar xvf htop-3.0.5.tar.gz
$ cd htop-3.0.5/
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install

Using htop

Run the tool by typing htop in a terminal.

Interface Overview

The header shows CPU, Memory, Swap usage, load average, and uptime.

The main pane lists processes sorted by CPU utilization.

The footer provides shortcuts such as help , setup , filter , tree , kill , nice , and quit .

Press F2 or S to open the Setup menu, where you can configure displayed meters, column order, and color schemes.

Use the tree (or t) key to toggle the process‑tree view.