Usage Guide

This guide provides a detailed overview of the gtop dashboard and its interactive features.

The Dashboard UI

The gtop interface is composed of several widgets, each displaying a specific set of system metrics. The layout is organized in a grid:

  • CPU History (Top): A line graph that plots the usage history of each CPU core on your system. Each core is represented by a different colored line. The legend on the right shows the current percentage load for each CPU.

  • Memory and Swap History (Middle-Left): A line graph that shows the historical usage of both physical memory (RAM) and swap space.

  • Memory & Swap Donuts (Middle-Right): Two donut charts providing a real-time view of the current Memory and Swap usage. The label displays the amount used out of the total available (e.g., 12.31 GiB of 15.56 GiB).

  • Network History (Bottom-Left): A sparkline graph showing the history of network traffic. It displays separate labels for data being received (Rx) and transferred (Tx), showing the current speed and total data transferred.

  • Disk Usage (Bottom-Left): A donut chart that visualizes the used space on your primary disk partition.

  • Process Table (Bottom-Right): An interactive table listing the currently running processes on the system.

Interactive Commands

While gtop is running, you can interact with the Process Table using keyboard commands to sort the list.

  • p: Sort the process table by Process ID (PID).
  • c: Sort the process table by CPU usage.
  • m: Sort the process table by Memory usage.

Pressing the same key again will reverse the sort order (ascending/descending).

Troubleshooting

If you see question marks or other incorrect characters in the dashboard, your terminal may not be using the correct character encoding. Try running gtop with the following environment variables to resolve the issue:

LANG=en_US.utf8 TERM=xterm-256color gtop