If you’re a nerd like me, you love htop. It’s the nicer version of the usual ‘top’ command.

Who doesn’t love this kind of thing running on their computer?

A long time ago, the only way to install htop was to compile it from source yourself, or worse, copy a binary that someone else compiled.

Well, there’s a better way. And it’s also a great introduction to using the Homebrew package manager for Mac OS X.

Here’s a video of install htop on Mac OS X using Homebrew. Screenshots after the video.

The first step is to visit the http://brew.sh site and copy that line of code.

Great, now open a terminal window, and paste that command in there. If you don’t have Xcode installed, you’ll be prompted to download some components.

Great, now that Homebrew is installed, you can install packages by using the command “brew install” + the package name. i.e.: “brew install htop” will install htop.

All done. Now just run ‘htop’ in a terminal window for all your system-monitoring and process-viewing needs.

UPDATE: Use this method to Install HTOP on Mac OS X instead. Much better.

If you’re a nerd (and you know you are), then you’ve used ‘top’ for monitoring your system:

Which is cool and nerdy enough. But htop is even nerdier. Linux nerds know this, which is why apt-get install htop is one of our first commands on a fresh install. It’s great for monitoring your webservers and other linux boxes.

Here’s themainframe.ca server running htop:

But this command isn’t part of Mac OS X.

Sure, you can follow the various tutorials out there, to install git, then grab the htop source code and install it yourself. Or you can be a lazy nerd and grab the binary that I’ve compiled and install it.

Copy and paste the following commands into a terminal window:

curl -O http://themainframe.ca/content/images/2011/06/htop.zip
unzip htop.zip
sudo mv htop /bin
rm htop.zip

You will need to enter your password for the ‘sudo’ line above.

Then you can run it from the terminal anywhere by just typing htop.

(I followed the tutorial at http://jeetworks.org/node/60 to compile)