Table of contents

• Features
• Support
  • Official
  • Unofficial
• Installation
  • Cargo
  • Arch Linux
  • Debian / Ubuntu
  • Snap
  • Fedora / CentOS / AlmaLinux / Rocky Linux
  • Gentoo
  • Nix
  • Solus
  • Void
  • Homebrew
  • MacPorts
  • Scoop
  • Chocolatey
  • winget
  • Windows installer
  • Manual installation
  • Binaries
    • Auto-completion
• Usage
• Configuration
• Troubleshooting
• Contribution
  • Contributors
• Thanks

Features

As (yet another) process/system visualization and management application, bottom supports the typical features:

• Graphical visualization widgets for:

  • CPU usage over time, at an average and per-core level
  • RAM and swap usage over time
  • Network I/O usage over time

  with support for zooming in/out the current time interval displayed.

• Widgets for displaying info about:

  • Disk capacity/usage
  • Temperature sensors
  • Battery usage

• A process widget for displaying, sorting, and searching info about processes, as well as support for:

  • Kill signals
  • Tree mode

• Cross-platform support for Linux, macOS, and Windows, with more planned in the future.

• Customizable behaviour that can be controlled with command-line flags or a config file, such as:

  • Custom and built-in colour themes
  • Customizing widget behaviour
  • Changing the layout of widgets
  • Filtering out entries in some widgets

• Some other nice stuff, like:

  • An htop-inspired basic mode
  • Expansion, which focuses on just one widget

• And more!

You can find more details in the documentation.

Support

Official

bottom officially supports the following operating systems and corresponding architectures:

• macOS (x86_64, aarch64)
• Linux (x86_64, i686, aarch64)
• Windows (x86_64, i686)

These platforms are tested to work for the most part and issues on these platforms will be fixed if possible. Furthermore, binaries are expected to be built and tested using the most recent version of stable Rust at the time.

For more details on supported platforms and known problems, check out the documentation.

Unofficial

bottom may work on a number of platforms that aren't officially supported. Note that unsupported platforms:

• Might not be tested in CI to build or pass tests (see here for checked platforms).
• Might not be properly tested by maintainers prior to a stable release.
• May only receive limited support, such as missing features or bugs that may not be fixed.

Note that some unsupported platforms may eventually be officially supported (e.g., FreeBSD).

A non-comprehensive list of some currently unofficially supported platforms that may compile/work include:

• FreeBSD (x86_64)
• Linux (armv6, armv7, powerpc64le, riscv64gc)
• Android (arm64)

For more details on unsupported platforms and known problems, check out the documentation.

Installation

Cargo

Installation via cargo can be done by installing the bottom crate:

# If required, update Rust to the stable channel first:
rustup update stable

# Install
cargo install bottom --locked

# If you use another channel by default, you can specify
# the stable channel like so:
cargo +stable install bottom --locked

# --locked may be omitted if you wish to not use the
# locked crate versions in Cargo.lock. However, be
# aware that this may cause problems with dependencies.
cargo install bottom

Arch Linux

bottom is available as an official package that can be installed with pacman:

sudo pacman -S bottom

Debian / Ubuntu

A .deb file is provided on each stable release and nightly builds for x86, aarch64, and armv7 (note stable ARM builds are only available for 0.6.8 and later). An example of installing this way:

# x86-64
curl -LO https://github.com/ClementTsang/bottom/releases/download/0.9.6/bottom_0.9.6_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i bottom_0.9.6_amd64.deb

# ARM64
curl -LO https://github.com/ClementTsang/bottom/releases/download/0.9.6/bottom_0.9.6_arm64.deb
sudo dpkg -i bottom_0.9.6_arm64.deb

# ARM
curl -LO https://github.com/ClementTsang/bottom/releases/download/0.9.6/bottom_0.9.6_armhf.deb
sudo dpkg -i bottom_0.9.6_armhf.deb

Snap

bottom is available as a snap:

sudo snap install bottom

# To allow the program to run as intended
sudo snap connect bottom:mount-observe
sudo snap connect bottom:hardware-observe
sudo snap connect bottom:system-observe
sudo snap connect bottom:process-control

Fedora / CentOS / AlmaLinux / Rocky Linux

bottom is available in COPR:

sudo dnf copr enable atim/bottom -y
sudo dnf install bottom

.rpm files are also generated (starting from 0.9.3) for x86. If you wish to install this way, then you can do something like:

# x86-64
curl -LO https://github.com/ClementTsang/bottom/releases/download/0.9.6/bottom-0.9.6-1.x86_64.rpm
sudo rpm -i bottom-0.9.6-1.x86_64.rpm

# Nightly x86-64
curl -LO https://github.com/ClementTsang/bottom/releases/download/nightly/bottom-0.9.6-1.x86_64.rpm
sudo rpm -i bottom-0.9.6-1.x86_64.rpm

Gentoo

Available in the official Gentoo repo:

sudo emerge --ask sys-process/bottom

Nix

Available in the nix-community repo:

nix-env -i bottom

Solus

Available in the Solus repos:

sudo eopkg it bottom

Void

Available in the void-packages repo:

sudo xbps-install bottom

Homebrew

Formula available here:

brew install bottom

MacPorts

Available here:

sudo port selfupdate
sudo port install bottom

Scoop

Available in the Main bucket:

scoop install bottom

Chocolatey

Chocolatey packages are located here:

choco install bottom

winget

The winget package can be found here:

winget install bottom

# If you need a more specific app id:
winget install Clement.bottom

You can uninstall via Control Panel, Options, or winget --uninstall bottom.

Windows installer

You can also manually install bottom as a Windows program by going to the latest release and installing via the .msi file.

Manual installation

There are a few ways to go about doing this manually. Note that you probably want to do so using the most recent version of stable Rust, which is how the binaries are built:

# If required, update Rust on the stable channel first
rustup update stable

# Option 1 - Download from releases and install
curl -LO https://github.com/ClementTsang/bottom/archive/0.9.6.tar.gz
tar -xzvf 0.9.6.tar.gz
cargo install --path . --locked

# Option 2 - Clone the repo and install manually
git clone https://github.com/ClementTsang/bottom
cd bottom
cargo install --path . --locked

# Option 3 - Clone and install directly from the repo all via Cargo
cargo install --git https://github.com/ClementTsang/bottom --locked

# You can also pass in the target-cpu=native flag for
# better CPU-specific optimizations. For example:
RUSTFLAGS="-C target-cpu=native" cargo install --path . --locked

Binaries

You can also use the pre-built release binaries manually:

• Latest stable release, generated off of the release branch
• Latest nightly release, generated off of the main branch at 00:00 UTC daily

To use, download and extract the binary that matches your system. You can then run by doing:

./btm

or by installing to your system following whatever the procedure is for installing a binary to your system.

Auto-completion

The release binaries are packaged with shell auto-completion files for bash, fish, zsh, and Powershell. To install them:

• For bash, move btm.bash to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/bash_completion or /etc/bash_completion.d/.
• For fish, move btm.fish to $HOME/.config/fish/completions/.
• For zsh, move _btm to one of your $fpath directories.
• For PowerShell, add _btm.ps1 to your PowerShell profile.

The individual auto-completion files are also included in the stable/nightly releases as completion.tar.gz.

Usage

You can run bottom using btm.

• For help on flags, use btm -h for a quick overview or btm --help for more details.
• For info on key and mouse bindings, press ? inside bottom or refer to the documentation.

You can find more information on usage in the documentation.

Configuration

bottom accepts a number of command-line arguments to change the behaviour of the application as desired. Additionally, bottom will automatically generate a configuration file on the first launch, which one can change as appropriate.

More details on configuration can be found in the documentation.

Troubleshooting

If some things aren't working, give the troubleshooting page a look. If things still aren't working, then consider opening a question or filing a bug report.

Contribution

Whether it's reporting bugs, suggesting features, maintaining packages, or submitting a PR, contribution is always welcome! Please read CONTRIBUTING.md for details on how to contribute to bottom.

Contributors

Thanks to all contributors:

Marcin Wojnarowski	Mahmoud Al-Qudsi	Andy	Kim Brose	Sven-Hendrik Haase	Artem Polishchuk	Trung L
dm9pZCAq	Lukas Rysavy	Erlend Hamberg	Frederick Zhang	pvanheus	Zeb Piasecki	Brian Di Palma
Lasha Kanteladze	Herby Gillot	Greg Brown	TotalCaesar659	George Rawlinson	adiabatic	Randy Barlow
Patrick Jackson	Mateusz Mikua	Guillaume Gomez	shura	Wesley Moore	xgdgsc	ViridiCanis
Justin Martin	Diana	Hervy Qurrotul Ainur Rozi	Mike Rivnak	lroobrou	database64128	Chon Sou
DrSheppard	Rare Constantin	felipesuri	spital	Michael Bikovitsky	Dmitry Valter	Twan Stok
Yuxuan Shui	Wenqing Zong	Gabriele Belluardo	Zeb Piasecki

Thanks

• This project is very much inspired by gotop, gtop, and htop.

• This application was written with many, many libraries, and built on the work of many talented people. This application would be impossible without their work. I used to thank them all individually but the list got too large...

• And of course, another round of thanks to all the contributors and package maintainers!