NeoHtop is a free, MIT-licensed, cross-platform desktop system monitor built with Rust, Tauri and Svelte, aimed at developers and system administrators who want a fast graphical view of running processes, CPU and memory without living in a terminal.

What it is

NeoHtop is a system monitoring application for the desktop. Its interface is written in SvelteKit and TypeScript, its backend in Rust on top of Tauri, and theming is handled through CSS variables with FontAwesome icons. It runs on macOS, Linux and Windows, and the README describes it as modern and cross-platform. Official builds are published through the GitHub Releases page, and the macOS release is notarized by Apple.

It sits in the same niche as terminal monitors such as htop and btop, both of which appear in its topic list, but it delivers that functionality as a graphical application rather than a curses-style interface. The concrete problem it solves is process inspection and control: a user who needs to find a misbehaving process, read its CPU and memory footprint, and terminate it, does so in a windowed UI instead of scrolling a terminal. The project also publishes a separate CLI, NeoHtop CLI, built with Go and the Charm ecosystem, for people who prefer the terminal.

Key capabilities

• Real-time process monitoring with auto-refreshing system statistics.
• CPU and memory usage tracking for the machine and for individual processes.
• Advanced process search and filtering by name, command or PID, with comma-separated terms such as arm, x86 for multiple matches.
• Regular expression support in the search box, for example d$ to list daemons or ^(\w+\.)+\w+$ to find reverse domain name notation processes such as com.docker.vmnetd.
• Process management, including killing processes and pinning important ones so they stay visible.
• Sortable columns, allowing any column to be used as the sort key.
• Dark and light themes, plus a terminal companion, installed with npm install -g neohtop-cli, offering real-time CPU sparklines, memory bars, a process tree view, search, filters and themes.

Who uses it and how

• macOS users install it as a cask with brew install --cask neohtop and can launch it with elevated privileges via sudo /Applications/NeoHtop.app/Contents/MacOS/NeoHtop to monitor processes that require sudo.
• Arch Linux users install from the AUR with yay -S neohtop or paru -S neohtop; Fedora users enable the Terra repository and run dnf install neohtop.
• Windows users add the Scoop extras bucket and install with scoop install extras/neohtop; Solus users run eopkg install neohtop.
• Operators who work in a terminal rather than a GUI use the CLI, which runs on macOS, Linux and Windows.
• Builders and contributors work from source, which requires Node.js v16 or later, a recent stable Rust toolchain, and Xcode Command Line Tools on macOS.

Getting started

Download the latest release from the GitHub Releases page, or install through a package manager such as Homebrew, the AUR, Terra, Scoop or eopkg. The terminal version installs from npm with npm install -g neohtop-cli.

How it compares

NeoHtop occupies the space filled by htop and btop, but trades the terminal interface for a graphical one built on Tauri, while keeping the same MIT licence and cross-platform reach. Where those tools are distributed primarily as source or distro packages, NeoHtop ships notarized macOS builds and community packages for Homebrew, the AUR, Terra, Scoop and eopkg. It requires no account, licence key or hosted service, and all monitoring data stays on the local machine.

When to use it — and when not to

A self-hoster operates nothing beyond the application itself, since there is no database, storage backend or mail service to run, but monitoring some processes does require launching with sudo. Users who want only a terminal monitor are better served by htop, btop or the project's own CLI rather than the desktop app. The main caveat is distribution: the README states plainly that the package-manager builds are community-maintained and not officially released, reviewed or endorsed, that only GitHub Releases builds are official, and that their security, integrity and update frequency cannot be guaranteed.

npm install -g neohtop-cli

brew install --cask neohtop

yay -S neohtop

paru -S neohtop

dnf install neohtop

scoop bucket add extras

scoop install extras/neohtop

eopkg install neohtop

# Install dependencies
npm install

# Run in development mode
npm run tauri dev

# Build for production
npm run tauri build

# Format all files
npm run format

# Check formatting without making changes
npm run format:check