What is bpytop?

bpytop is a terminal-based resource monitor for Linux, macOS, and FreeBSD. A resource monitor shows you in real time how your computer is using its processor, memory, storage, and network connection, and which running programs are consuming those resources. bpytop runs entirely inside a text terminal window and uses colored graphs and charts to display this information visually. The tool is written in Python and is a rewrite of an earlier shell-script version called bashtop. It shows live graphs for CPU usage, memory usage, disk read and write speeds, and network traffic. It also shows a sortable list of running processes, lets you filter that list by name, and lets you send termination signals to processes directly from the interface, which is useful for stopping a program that has become unresponsive. All of the controls can be operated with a keyboard, and the interface also supports mouse clicks and scrolling. The display is built using Unicode characters (including braille symbols) to draw smooth-looking graphs inside a plain terminal. This means it requires a terminal that supports 24-bit color and a font that includes those Unicode characters. If your terminal or font does not support them, the graphs will look broken. The README includes notes on this and links to compatible fonts and terminal applications. As of September 2021, the author released a new C++ version called btop (at a separate repository), which is faster and uses no external libraries. The bpytop repository remains available and functional, but active development moved to btop. Installation options include pip (the standard Python package installer), Homebrew on macOS, Snap packages on Linux, and manual installation from source. The only required dependency beyond Python 3.7 is a library called psutil, which handles reading system statistics across different operating systems. The project is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.