How to install and use vtop graphical terminal activity monitor on Linux

The vtop is a graphical activity monitor for the command line written in Node.js. How do I install vtop on my Linux server?

From the project page:

Command-line tools like “top” make it difficult to see CPU usage across multi-process applications (like Apache and Chrome), spikes over time, and memory usage. That’s why we created vtop. Vtop is a free and open source activity monitor for the command line. It’s written in node.js and can be easily extended

Installation

First install Node.js if not installed on your system. Next type the following command to install vtop:
$ sudo npm install -g vtop
Sample outputs:

How do I use it?

Type the command:
$ vtop
Sample outputs:

You can setup the vtop theme:
$ vtop -t wizard
Possible theme options: acid, becca, brew, dark, monokai, parallax, seti and wizard:
$ vtop -t parallax
Sample outputs:

Keyboard shortcuts

Press u to update to the latest version of vtop.
Arrow up or kto move up the process list.
Arrow down or j to move down.
Press g to go to the top of the process list.
Press G to move to the end of the list.
Press dd to kill all the processes in that group.

Even though vtop is pretty fancy. I recommend htop tool or atop utility or top command only for server usage.

Posted by: Vivek Gite

The author is the creator of nixCraft and a seasoned sysadmin, DevOps engineer, and a trainer for the Linux operating system/Unix shell scripting. Get the latest tutorials on SysAdmin, Linux/Unix and open source topics via RSS/XML feed or weekly email newsletter.

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2 comment

Htop is nice and can be installed through apt-get

Interestingly, it doesn’t show the proper CPU usage in the process list window. It shows the proper usage in the graph, but I have a VMWare VM currently doing a process that’s eating up (according to htop) 376% CPU (4 virtual CPUs, 400% is all 4 pegged). vtop shows in the graph that we’re nearly pegged, but the process list just has vmware listed once, taking up a mere 9.1% of the CPU.

vtop is neat, but for accuracy on my particular system, I’ll stick to top and htop.

anon says:

May 11, 2017 at 12:10 pm

Htop is nice and can be installed through apt-get
Jon says:

May 11, 2017 at 2:03 pm

Interestingly, it doesn’t show the proper CPU usage in the process list window. It shows the proper usage in the graph, but I have a VMWare VM currently doing a process that’s eating up (according to htop) 376% CPU (4 virtual CPUs, 400% is all 4 pegged). vtop shows in the graph that we’re nearly pegged, but the process list just has vmware listed once, taking up a mere 9.1% of the CPU.

vtop is neat, but for accuracy on my particular system, I’ll stick to top and htop.

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