Basic Usage

Start the program with htop. When running inside a desktop terminal emulator, htop supports mouse interaction — you can scroll, click to sort columns, and use the bottom menu.

Kill a Process

Use the arrow keys to move through the process list. By default, Vim motion keys are not working.

To kill a process, press F9 or k and then choose the signal to send.

Like the kill command in shell:

• 15 SIGTERM - recommended to try first
• 9 SIGKILL - forcibly terminates the process

SIGKILL may leave behind artifacts such as stale terminal output because the process is terminated without cleanup. Example: terminate htop process with SIGKILL, and there will be leftover contents in terminal window.

Find the Desired Process

Press u to show the list of users, and then narrow down the process list by selecting one.

Press F3 or / to search the process by name. The search is incremental and highlights matches.

Shortcuts

Some commonly used shortcus:

• PgUp, PgDn, Home & End - move the cursor as expected
• \ - filter the process list by keyword
• t - toggle tree view
• / - search by process name
• Shift + p - sort by CPU usage
• Shift + m - sort by memory usage
• H - toggle userland threads
  • threads appear under their parent process
  • MEM% is a process-level meter, so all threads under the same process show the same value
• q - quit htop

UI Setup

Press F2 to open Setup, where you can customize what htop displays. Some useful options include:

• Tree view - show processes in parent/children relationships
  • 
• CPU temporature - display per‑core or overall temperature if supported by your system
  • 
• CPU usage layout - control how multiple CPU cores are grouped and shown. Example: on a 32-core CPU, selecting CPUs (1-4/8): first half in 4 shorter columns
  • 
    • first half - CPU cores from number 0 to number 15
    • in 4 shorter columns - 0-15 cores are shown in 4 columns, so 4 CPU cores per column