 Anybody that has been following my channel for a little while knows that I love H-Top. H-Top is my favorite system monitor application. So if I'm taking a look at a Linux distribution for the very first time, I typically fire up H-Top to check out CPU and RAM usage. And the reason I do this is because H-Top is kind of like the de facto system monitoring application for GNU slash Linux, right? It's kind of the standard. And on most Linux distributions, it's already installed. Not on every Linux distribution, some you do actually have to go out of your way to install H-Top, but for the most part it's usually there. And I like using the same tool to measure system resource usage across the various Linux distributions and desktop environments. So H-Top is the tool that I've kind of settled on. One of the things that I don't think most people know about is that H-Top is customizable. There are some options available to you. Most people don't take advantage of them. And to be honest, I'm one of those people. I typically don't really customize H-Top because out of the box it's pretty good, right? The information it displays by default, it displays your CPU threads. So I have 24 threads with my CPU and that's why I've got so many going on here. Then we have RAM, SWAP, the test. Now that's the processes that are currently running, the load average. And then at the bottom is actually the process list. So these are all the processes that are currently running on my computer. It's going to be a very long list if I scroll down. Now you can sort this list by default, it's sorting it by CPU percentage. Sometimes you want to sort it by memory percentage. If you've got some runaway process that's sucking up all your RAM, this is a good way to figure that out. But you can sort it by various other things including process ID, user priority, niceness, et cetera. Now probably the most common thing people do with H-Top is find a process that is kind of out of control and you kill it. So you do have some hints here as far as what you can do with H-Top. F9 is the kill command. So if there's some crazy process that I want to kill such as OBS here, now I don't want to kill OBS because that's the program recording my screen right now. But if I did, I could hit F9, let me hit F9, and then it's going to ask exactly what kind of kill command do I want. SIG term is the default and that's typically what you want. If I hit enter right now, it would actually kill OBS and stop me recording. So I'm actually not going to do that. But what a lot of people don't realize is F2 down here says set up. And if you do F2, you actually get some customization options. So for example, on the far left hand side, we have meters, display options, colors, columns. And if I go back to meters, these are actually what are being displayed at the top of the screen. So my terminal color scheme is a little wonky here. This is actually black text on a black background, that's why we can't see what these columns are. But if I highlight it, you can see on the left column, we have CPUs. So that's half of my CPUs, so the first 12. And then the right column at the top, you have the other half of my CPUs. So the other 12. And then obviously, we have the memory bar, the swap bar on the left columns. And then on the right columns, we have the task counter and the load average. Now, one of the things that some people may want to change, especially if you have a ton of threads, like I've got 24 threads to be honest. This takes up a lot of screen real estate, especially if I'm not running a terminal full screen. Maybe I'm only running half a screen or a third of the screen. This is way too much screen real estate for these CPU meters. And that's for 24 threads. Now these days, CPUs is becoming more common to have 32 threads, 64 threads. One 28 threads, which would be crazy, like it would just take up the entire screen. So there are other CPU meters you could add. So if I go up here and I hit the delete key, I'll get rid of those bars. So now I'm left with memory swap, task load average, which I do want. I'm going to leave those, but we have other CPU options here. You know, actually a lot of other CPU options for me, because I have 24 threads. You do have to be kind of careful which ones you pick. For example, this one here, one through four of eight means that for half of my threads, which are 12, it's going to divide them by eight and put them in equal columns. Well, 12 doesn't divide equally by eight. So that's not a good one for me, but 12 does divide equally by four. So I've got one and two of four that would probably work for me. Let's try it. So I'm going to move this with the arrow keys, move it over to the left column. And there you go. I've got my first 12 threads there of my thread ripper. But now instead of having the first 12 threads in one column in the left hand column, it divides it into two shorter columns. So that saves a little bit on screen real estate. So if I'm moving the arrows, it moves around. But what I want to do is hit enter. It will save that. And then I'm going to go back down here and I'm going to go to CPUs three and four divided by four and put that in the right column and then hit enter to save it there. And that is a much cleaner way of displaying those 24 threads than the way it was doing by default. And of course, there's nothing saying that I've got to keep it this way. What I could do is hit enter again so I can still move this around. I could actually move that to the left hand column. I could actually put them all in one column. And then I could put like a list of stuff like task and load average. Matter of fact, since we're just playing around, maybe I want other than the task and load average, maybe I also want battery. Now I'm not on a laptop, so battery doesn't make sense, but let's just add it. I could add date and time. Date and time might be useful information to have displayed in each top. I have 64 gigs of RAM on this machine. So the likelihood that I will ever see a swap being used is pretty unlikely, so I could actually get rid of that. I'll just highlight the swap bar and hit the delete key just to get rid of that. Because that seems like something I probably am never going to see anyway. Some other information other than all the CPU information. Disk IO could be interesting for some people, especially you system administrators. Maybe you want disk IO, network IO, hit enter on that. Some other options available, SE Linux state overview won't do anything for me. SystemD system state and overview. I guess that tells you how many system D processes are running. I guess I can keep that for now. Anyway, that's just me playing around with the default setup as far as the meters. And that's the top section of your H top. If I hit escape, when we get the top meters, how they look with the bottom process thing going on. That's your interactive processes here at the bottom. You can actually customize the process list as well. If I go back into F2 and I go into display options. And this is one I often do turn on. I kind of like having a tree view for my processes. So I'm going to tick on those first two and I'm going to hit escape. And tree view is really a nice visual way of viewing these processes as far as the processes that are related to each other in this kind of tree like view. Going to hit F2 to get back into setup, go back into display options. Most of this other stuff is kind of superfluous stuff that doesn't matter too much. Like if I really wanted to, the CPU meters at the top, I can have them show the CPU frequency. I don't know why you'd really want to do that. But if I hit enter, you see I tick that on and now it's showing the percentage being used and then out to the side. The frequency, I'm going to tick that back off. If I wanted to, I could show CPU temperature out to the side of the percentages. That might be useful. I could see that being somewhat useful. The CPU frequency I don't really need to see if you want to change the temperatures to Fahrenheit instead of Celsius. You could tick that on. I will tick that on while I'm here. There's no reason not to. Some things that some people may want to play around with. By default, H top hides the kernel threads. If you wanted to see them, you could tick that off. I'm going to leave it off by default. You do have color options. So if you didn't want to use your default terminal color scheme, for example, if I wanted to do monochromatic, you know, I could do that. I find that kind of hideous. There's black on white and light terminal midnight commander. Yeah, that's bad too. I'm going to go back to my default color scheme. You can also change the columns. That would be the columns in the interactive process list here at the bottom. You can change how all of that is sorted as well. One neat thing I sometimes do with H top is there is an option under display options for highlight program base name. I'm going to tick that on and then hit escape. And it actually makes the actual program name bold. If your terminal actually supports bold text, if your font has a bold text. Now, anytime you do this setup process in H top with F2 and you tick on various settings or turn off various settings, it does write that to a config file. So let me open up a graphical file manager. I'll open up PC man FM and I'm going to go into dot config in my home directory and in dot config slash H top, you'll find H top RC. And it's a plain text file. Let me just open that. I'll open that in Vim so you guys can see what it is. It's not very user friendly as far as what it's actually setting here. I'm assuming all the ones that are set with zero and one are kind of like true and false. Is it ticked on or is it ticked off? But then you have things like fields equals and then this string of numbers. I don't know what that is. The same thing. Left meter modes equals one one one right meter modes equals one two two. I'm not exactly sure what, what some of that stuff is. So typically you're not going to be doing this kind of customization directly into this config file. This is just H top writes to this config file. I wouldn't play with it. You could version control it. I guess if you find, if you set everything in H top and wanted to save it to like a GitHub or a get lab, I guess you could do that. But to be honest, it's so easy and so quick to quickly turn all of this stuff on and off, I honestly wouldn't bother. So that's just a little bit of what you can do with some of the customization options with H top. I know that typically when you fire up H top, you're there for specific reason, usually to search for a process and kill it. Most people don't ever go into the setup stuff and you'll play with those settings. But now that you guys know it's there, maybe you want to play with it, especially those of you that do like system admin work or whatever and you use H top all the time and maybe you do actually want to customize, especially some of what is displayed in that top section as far as some of the readouts, the meters. Do you want to see things like disk IO and network and things like that? Now, before I go, I need to thank the producers of this episode. I need to thank Epsadale, Escape Blue, Mitchell, Alan and Commie, Archive 530, Choke David, David Dillon, Gregory Lewis, Paul, Polytech, Scott, Steven, Sven, Wes and Willie. These guys, they are my highest tier patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, this episode you just watched. It wouldn't have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because the DistroTube channel is sponsored by you guys, the community. If you'd like to support my work, please consider subscribing to DistroTube over on Patreon. All right guys, peace.