One could argue that there’s something remarkably satisfying about using a good CLI tool for basic tasks. After all, command line-based tools do have some very important inherent advantages over their counterparts with proper GUIs mainly regarding speed and low system resource consumption.
There are numerous very awesome CLI system monitoring tools for Linux such as btop, bashtop, top, bpytop, and htop, just to name some of the most popular ones. However, the new kid on the block, Gotop, promises to offer similar functionalities, including some very nifty customization options.
Good addition to the “top” family?
According to its GitHub page, Gotop is “another terminal-based graphical activity monitor, inspired by gtop and vtop, this time written in Go.”
By default, the application displays various useful stats such as the CPU usage (per core as % and graph), the disk usage (including % free space), CPU temperature, memory usage, network usage (graph plus the total amount of data sent and received), as well as a process table (CPU + MEM stats).
Another great aspect of Gotop is the way it looks. For a CLI-based tool, it looks rather funky with its nice and colorful dashboard. What’s even more impressive about Gotop is its customization potential. You can heavily tweak the default look and feel of the app by changing its layout, widgets, color schemes, and so forth.
Last but not least, Gotop is a very easy-to-use tool. Simply launch a Terminal session, and type the following command “gotop -l” to start it open. You can use the “gotop -l kitchensink” for an extra array of information, the “c” key to re-order the process table by CPU usage, “m” to order the process table by the amount of memory in use, “p” to sort by PID, and “h” and “l” to scale the CPU graph.
Conclusion
If you’re a fan of CLI-based system monitoring tool that end with “top,” then there’s a good chance you’ll like Gotop. It’s fast, light on system resources, it looks nice, it’s free and open-source, and it has various customization options that most other tools of this sort do not.
