Installing htop on Manjaro

Install htop on Manjaro LinuxIn my previous blog post I talked about installing Manjaro Linux as the sole OS on my old MacBook Pro.  That install is still running beautifully and I have not run into any significant problems so far.  In this post I am going to go through the steps I followed to install htop on my Manjaro machine.

What is htop?

htop is an interactive process viewer for Unix systems. It allows you to see the resource usage on your machine and to keep an eye on system load in real time.  It is an improvement on the default top that runs on most Linux distros.  Installing htop on most distros is pretty straightforward as binaries exist and are available from the main htop website.  However, I could not find a binary for Arch-based distros like Manjaro.  So I opted to go the Git route as described on this page: https://memo-linux.com/installer-htop-2-0-sur-gnulinux/.  I am rewriting the steps here for reference in English.

Install ncurses

First you have to install ncurses as htop 2.0 requires it to run.  The terminal command to install ncurses is:

 sudo pacman -S ncurses 

Download htop and compile

Next, clone htop from Github.  In your terminal, type:

 git clone https://github.com/hishamhm/htop

Then traverse into the folder you just created:

 cd htop

Now compile htop using the following three commands:


./autogen.sh

./configure

make

And now the final step is to create a symbolic link to htop that will allow you to run it directly from terminal:

 sudo ln -s ~/htop/htop /usr/bin

You should now be able to run htop.  Just type

 htop

in your terminal.

Some cool screenshots and different configuration options on the official htop website here:  http://hisham.hm/htop/index.php?page=screenshots

Enjoy.

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