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Processes

Settings

If you want to change some of the default behaviour of the processes widget, you can configure some things in the config file.

Field Type Functionality
get_threads Boolean Gather process thread information.
hide_k_threads Boolean Hide kernel threads from being shown. Linux only.
tree_collapse Boolean Collapse the process tree by default when tree mode is set.
process_command Boolean Shows the full command name instead of the process name by default.
disable_advanced_kill Boolean Disable the advanced kill dialog and just show the basic one with no options. Linux, macOS, FreeBSD only.
default_memory_value Boolean Defaults to showing process memory usage by value.
default_grouped Boolean Groups processes with the same name by default. No effect if --tree is set.
regex Boolean Enables regex by default while searching.
case_sensitive Boolean Enables case sensitivity by default when searching.
whole_word Boolean Enables whole-word matching by default while searching.
default_tree Boolean Makes the process widget use tree mode by default.
current_usage Boolean Calculates process CPU usage as a percentage of current usage rather than total usage.
unnormalized_cpu Boolean Show process CPU% usage without averaging over the number of CPU cores.

Columns

You can configure which columns are shown by the process widget by setting the columns setting:

[processes]
# Pick which columns you want to use in any order.
columns = ["cpu%", "mem%", "pid", "name", "read", "write", "tread", "twrite", "state", "user", "time", "gmem%", "gpu%"]

Default Sort Order

By default, the process widget starts sorted by CPU usage. You can change the column it sorts by at startup:

[processes]
default_sort = "mem"

Any of the column names accepted by columns work here (e.g. "cpu%", "mem", "pid", "name", "read"). If the column you pick is not actually shown by the widget, the built-in default is used instead.

The same setting is also exposed as a CLI flag, which takes precedence over the config file:

btm --process_default_sort mem