htop is the interactive, colourised process viewer that replaced top on most analyst workstations. It is keyboard-driven, mouse-aware, and exposes information the original top does not:
- Process parent/child tree (
F5). - Filter and search (
F3/F4). - Kill a process by selecting and pressing
F9. - Per-CPU and per-thread views.
- Customisable columns and meters.
Sibling tools worth knowing: atop (records system activity to binary logs for later replay), btop (rich TUI graphs), and glances (cross-platform Python alternative).