htop

An evolution over standard top, htop provides an interactive, full terminal view process management environment. htop isn't always installed by default, however most distributions include it as an installable option their package manager repositories - more on those later. At the time of writing this section, htop had been adopted as part of the default installation for Ubuntu Server.

Running and interacting with htop is very simple:

htop

A running instance of htop

htop has many additional options, and unlike top where those options are not apparent and require prior knowledge of shortcuts, htop trivialises the process through the use of function keys. They keys are fairly self explanatory, so take a quick look at the screenshot above to gain a quick familiarisation.

Much like with top, if you want to be able to kill or renice any processes, you need to run htop as the root user. If you just want to display processes and possibly kill or change your own processes, you can do that as a regular user