#RaspberryPi – Where is my Task Manager? let’s try #htop

Hi !

As a Windows user, I use task manager a lot. You know that moment when

1. Your PC start to work very slow
2. You press CTRL+SHIFT+ESC to open Task Manager
3. Select the not amicable process
4. And Kill it !

Bonus: another group of people uses a more classic way

1. Press CTRL+ALT+DEL
2. Select Task Manager
3. …

These days where I’m doing part of my developer work in a Raspberry Pi 4 (see references), I was also in the need for a “Task Manager”. So a quick Bing/Google search pointed a couple of products, and htop seems to be a very popular one. And I also like the official product description

This is htop, an interactive process viewer for Unix systems. It is a text-mode application (for console or X terminals) and requires ncurses.

Official htop page (see references)

It seems that initially the product was created for Unix, and now supports FreeBSD, OpenBSD, macOS, and more. And, of course, it runs on Raspbian.

Question: Should I write a post on how to install Raspbian for Raspberry Pi? My guess is no, there are so many of this already out, but ... if get bored.

Before I move on, let’s take a look at htop running in my device, while I’m building a docker image using some amazing TensorFlow image analysis models.

The way to install htop is very straightforward.

sudo apt-get install htop

Then you can launch the app with

htop

Super Easy ! And again, the UI gives you a lot of very useful information, and because Linux users are heavy on commands and not mouse, 99% of the actions to control the app are using these commands

• F1 – Help (explains everything, always nice)
• F6 – SortBy (You can sort the list processes with this option. Sorting by user, CPU usage and memory usage can be useful.)
• F9 – Kill (You can select a process and send a kill signal)
• F10 – Quit (sometimes you gotta leave htop)

Note: Get the commands and learn from David Walz post (see references)

Happy Coding!

Greetings @ Burlington

El Bruno

References

• HTop, http://hisham.hm/htop/
• htop – Task Manager for Linux (including Raspbian!) https://www.bitpi.co/2015/12/30/htop-linux-task-manager/
• El Bruno, How to install .Net Core in a Raspberry Pi 4 and test with HelloWorld https://elbruno.com/2019/08/27/raspberrypi-how-to-install-dotnetcore-in-a-raspberrypi4-and-test-with-helloworld-of-course/
• El Bruno, Installing Visual Studio Code in a Raspberry Pi https://elbruno.com/2019/08/20/vscode-installing-visual-studio-code-in-a-raspberrypi-a-couple-of-lessons-learned-code/
• El Bruno, Build and Run C# ,NetCore projects in a Raspberry Pi 4 with Visual Studio Code https://elbruno.com/2019/08/28/vscode-build-and-run-c-dotnetcore-projects-in-raspberrypi/
• Let’s do some Git dev in Raspberry Pi 4 (GitHub and Azure DevOps!) https://elbruno.com/2019/09/02/vscode-lets-do-some-git-dev-in-raspberrypi-github-and-azure-devops/
• How to install Docker in a Raspberry Pi 4 https://elbruno.com/2019/09/17/vscode-how-to-install-docker-in-a-raspberrypi-4/