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:

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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