htop vs btop vs vtop vs ptop: features and a local benchmark
Which terminal system monitor should you use? Compare htop, btop, vtop, and ptop with practical recommendations and reproducible macOS CPU and memory measurements.
CTO building products that move businesses forward
I'm Pate, CTO at Code/+/Trust and Workforce Wave, based in Charleston, SC. I lead engineering teams that build custom software for entrepreneurs and an AI voice platform that automates business communications.
New: spacebar, Markdown in Quick Look
Press Space. Markdown, fully rendered: Mermaid, math and code, right in Finder. Free and open source for macOS.
I also publish open source terminal tools: histy-cli, ports-cli and asciiquarium. See all packages.
How to Kill the Process on a Port (Mac, Linux, Windows)
How to kill the process on a port on macOS, Linux and Windows with lsof, ss, fuser and PowerShell. Free up port 3000 and stop EADDRINUSE errors.
ptop: a vtop alternative in Rust with lower memory use
Pate’s top copies vtop in Rust. On an M2 Max, it used 73% less CPU and 92% less own-process memory than vtop. See the benchmark and install instructions.
histy-cli: A Better Ctrl+R for zsh, bash and fish
histy-cli is an npm terminal UI that replaces Ctrl+R: browse, filter and run shell history by recent, frequent or unique. Try it with npx histy-cli.
ports-cli: Find and Kill the Process on a TCP Port
Stuck on EADDRINUSE? ports-cli is an interactive terminal UI that lists listening TCP ports and kills the process, with vim keys and search. Run npx ports-cli.
Work
- Company
- Code/+/Trust
- Role
- CTO
- Date
- Company
- Workforce Wave
- Role
- CTO
- Date
- Company
- ShiftNOW
- Role
- VP of Software
- Date
- Company
- ShiftNOW
- Role
- Lead Software Engineer
- Date
- Company
- Code/+/Trust
- Role
- Lead Software Engineer
- Date
- Company
- Code/+/Trust
- Role
- Software Engineer
- Date
- Company
- JRS Code School
- Role
- Student
- Date
Projects
- Name
- Jevfish
- Description
- A chess engine that never calculates a line. My code lists the legal, tactically...
- Name
- Workforce Wave
- Description
- I currently work on Workforce Wave in my free time. We are building AI agents to...
- Name
- ShiftNOW
- Description
- I worked at ShiftNOW as the VP of Software Development. We built a scalable plat...
- Name
- DataProtocol
- Description
- I lead the development of the initial DataProtocol product, a developer learning...
- Name
- Event.Gives Live
- Description
- During Covid I helped pivot Event.Gives to a virtual event platform. Building a ...
- Name
- Code/+/Trust
- Description
- At Code/+/Trust I got my start in developing software and helped build my first ...
- Name
- CandleFish
- Description
- I worked with a small team at Code/+/Trust to add custom features and build a cu...
- Name
- BlinkTBI
- Description
- For 2+ years I lead the development of the BlinkTBI web portal and mobile app....