Super system monitor

No sniggering at the back as Shashank Sharma shows you his bottom.

-  Shashank Sharma

OUR EXPERT Shashank Sharma is a trial lawyer in Delhi and an avid Arch user.

System monitors come in all shapes and sizes. At a minimum, they provide a quick look at active processes and CPU and memory utilization. Some tools, however, go a step further and also provide information about disk and network I/O. More often than not, the system monitor also provides colourful graphs and even lets you sort or kill processes. If you think all this is only possible with graphical utilities, you're in for a surprise.

Written in Rust and released under the MIT licence, Bottom is a rather robust system monitor with all the features listed above, and more. You won't find it in the software repositories of most distros, the exception being Arch Linux, but the project publishes a Deb binary for Ubuntu, Debian and other derivative distros, in addition to precompiled binaries. You'll find installation instructions on the project's GitHub page for different distros such as Fedora, where Bottom can be installed using the Copr repository.

As Bottom is written in Rust, one distro-neutral option to install it is to use Cargo, the package manager for Rust utilities. If you don't already have Rust and Cargo, you can use your distro's package manager to install these - sudo dnf install rust cargo installs these on RPM-based distributions such as Fedora. You can similarly run sudo apt install cargo, which also installs the Rustc package, if you're running Ubuntu or Debian or one of their derivatives.

With Cargo installed, you can now run cargo install bottom to install Bottom. You can launch it with the btm command. The interface features a number of different panes, such as CPU, Memory, Processes and so on. Bottom refers to these as widgets. The default interface features six different widgets.