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One of the few things I missed when I made my move from Linux to OSX is the ability to use htop. As many of you might know, OSX is based on Mach Kernel – a custom implementation of Unix. So right out of the box OSX gives you the power of many *nix command line tools, which is why users who are comfortable with *nix systems, fit right at home with OSX.

Unfortunately htop doesn’t have OSX binary available so you will basically have to install it from source. Fortunately, there is an OSX specific htop project out there.

First you will need to install git (skip if you already have git installed):

curl http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-1.6.3.3.tar.gz -O
tar xzvf git-1.6.3.3.tar.gz 
cd git-1.6.3.3
make configure 
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
NO_MSGFMT=yes make prefix=/usr/local all
sudo make install

Now you can use git to install htop-osx:

git clone git://github.com/AndyA/htop-osx.git
cd htop-osx
git checkout -b osx origin/osx
./autogen.sh
./configure
make 
sudo make install

  • Even though OSX comes with top and its own built-in system monitor, I have always found htop to be a much better way to monitor my system usage. Which is why I have it installed in all my server and monitor them from SSH.
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