1.6 KiB
A comment about bashtop
Among tops, bashtop deserves extra recognition. It's one of the most impressive pieces of work I've encountered, on a couple of levels. For one, it is full of interesting, uncommon, and useful features. For another, it was accomplished with pure bash. In other words, it does far more with a far less sophisticated tool than it's peers. bashtop has a thoughtful and intelligent design of how information is presented. It has an attractive interface, with features like greyscale coloring in the process list that draw your eye to the heaviest processes. It's a beautiful, pleasant terminal UI, and I haven't yet seen anything as good, even among GUIs with all of the tools at their disposal.
bashtop is also utterly insane. It is a single, 140KB, 3,508-line bash script. The author claims to be doing a rewrite in Python, but that will never undo the admiration I have for what he accomplished with bash. Respect, Aristocratos.
If bashtop is so great, then why am I maintaining gotop? Two reasons. First, because I can't contribute to bashtop. I'm not that good with bash - not at the astronomic level Aristocratos is working at - and I really don't want to be that good. I've been there, and bash -- while universal, very useful, and probably my go-to scripting tool -- is hell to maintain at any scale. 3,500 lines of bash is a headache, no matter how you slice it. And second, because it's relatively heavy on the CPU for a tool that's supposed to sit off to the side and be glanced at occasionally. But it is an inspiration, and I sincerely believe we all -- all of us developers -- can learn something about good UI design from bashtop.