Some recent notes, somewhat mac-specific:

"I'm having trouble finding one true activity monitor on mac. I tried all of these on mac with certain criteria in mind (reliability, renicing, good UX):

- Activity Monitor: doesn't update charts when in background, doesn't show nice value, doesn't allow renice, doesn't hide idle processes

- Apple's top: non-standard, information overload, no nice/renice/idle/filter

- htop: doesn't show accurate process cpu usages (known bug awaiting release), no idle hiding. (Use latest release to avoid crashes.)

- btop: hangs (known bug awaiting release), no nice/renice/idle hiding

- bottom: basic

- gotop: I forget

- glances: pretty good, supports nice & renice. That or htop seem to be the only options for that. glances is CPU-heavy.

- zenith: also good, faster, and at least shows nice. (Crashes if you sort by it, known bug awaiting fix.)"

I went with zenith.

I gave up on heavily customizing the UI after a couple of top variants (where I would lose said customizations for a variety of reasons) over the years so I run a fairly vanilla config: I like both the look and the information density of btop over htop out of the box.

btop is good, I like 'glances' the best though because like 'atop' it actually highlights whatever problem is most likely to be causing lag at the moment, and it breaks out docker containers into a separate section and labels them properly.

I have a few more listed + notes on them here: https://docs.sweeting.me/s/system-monitoring-tools#All-in-on...

btop is more colorful and a bit prettier. It has different color themes and it’s easy to open and close different views (network, memory, system processes, storage, etc). Not sure if there’s any real functional advantage though.