Is there a way to stop htop from listing idle processes, similar to top’s `i` function?
User power, not power users: htop and its design philosophy
41–50 of 98 posts
Re: User power, not power users: htop and its design philosophy
#42This is what quality software looks like: It has power features around the corner , which can be turned on by experts. But is nevertheless accessible by novices. CLI is trending amongst dev's again, and we should take a lesson by htop how to design a good user interface.
> CLI is trending amongst dev's again, and we should take a lesson by htop how to design a good user interface.
htop has a GUI, not a CLI. Some people call it a "TUI" but in terms of UX and program architecture it's a lot closer to a GUI than a CLI.
Re: User power, not power users: htop and its design philosophy
#43`htop` is amazing! Thank you!!
Re: User power, not power users: htop and its design philosophy
#44This is what quality software looks like: It has power features around the corner , which can be turned on by experts. But is nevertheless accessible by novices. CLI is trending amongst dev's again, and we should take a lesson by htop how to design a good user interface.
.. and performant! Folks need to stop shipping CLI tools written in node with a million dependencies.
Part of why the shell is gaining is that UIs are invariably becoming less efficient with rampant use of React and node for native apps.
I did not say node is slow.
Re: User power, not power users: htop and its design philosophy
#45When I first started using htop, I had the opposite misunderstanding to what the author describes. I spent a long time trying to understand why there were over a dozen instances of the same process, when I thought I launched just one! When I discovered that htop was showing threads instead of processes, I hit ctrl-h to hide threads and committed .htoprc to my dotfiles so I wouldn’t have to see them again.
Re: User power, not power users: htop and its design philosophy
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, but it became a bit of a victim of being unfashionable. I think partly because of an influx of new devs who weren't in the position of having little choice but to learn at least some of the non-GUI way, particularly in the web sphere. As things have matured (arguably) and become more complex, and those devs have gained experience, they've started seeing the benefits of other methodologies. I just hope it doesn't…
CLI has always been in vogue. It is TUI (text user interface – ncurses kind) has fallen out of fashion. Long time back, I used to use mutt, lynx, midnight commander etc on a daily basis. In mid/late 2000s, it fell off for me. Other than top, htop, dstat and a few others, there aren't that many that come to mind these days.
I'd say TUI:s are coming back with a vengeance.
Check out newsboat, nmtui, ranger, w3m, mikmod, slack-term/weechat/irssi/finch, sc, mps-youtube, micro (text editor) just to name a few... Seems to be very popular among people who use tiling window managers.
In fact, with a good terminal multiplexer, mpv and fbv, all you need X for is stuff like web apps and Gimp.
Re: User power, not power users: htop and its design philosophy
#47In my htop, user threads are not green. The only difference in the display is some text at the top telling me "414 thr". Is my setup messed up?
Very old htop versions do not distinguish threads by color.
You can delete ~/.config/htop/htoprc to reset it to default settings in case it's a misconfiguration.
Re: User power, not power users: htop and its design philosophy
#48One of the first things I do when launching htop on a new box is to disable threads. The current way of showing threads by default is untenable because some programs launch hundreds of threads, making it hard to get an overview of a system unless you make the terminal size very large. I appreciate the author wanting users to discover a program running amok and producing a bunch of threads (anecdote: I've never seen i…
I'm not aware of any other user scenario where launching htop and threads showing makes sense. Threads are details, while most people watch for OS processes first. That they are green doesn't help anyone if there's nobody to ask why or colours don't show properly. This is misguided newbie fixation that alienates those users who just need a reliable tool with sane defaults. Just another user feedback.
This is a lesson to all of us, that we might have very good reasons, but there's still a chance to be wrong about things.
Re: User power, not power users: htop and its design philosophy
#49When I first started using htop, I had the opposite misunderstanding to what the author describes. I spent a long time trying to understand why there were over a dozen instances of the same process, when I thought I launched just one! When I discovered that htop was showing threads instead of processes, I hit ctrl-h to hide threads and committed .htoprc to my dotfiles so I wouldn’t have to see them again.
And then every time you change a view option at run-time, your `.htoprc` gets modified.....
Re: User power, not power users: htop and its design philosophy
#50In my htop, user threads are not green. The only difference in the display is some text at the top telling me "414 thr". Is my setup messed up?
F2 -> Display options -> [x] Display threads in a different color