> You have no idea how many times I was asked “hey, why are some processes green?” over these 15+ years — and no, it wasn’t annoying: each of these times it was an opportunity to teach someone about threads!
That's because there isn't a easy way in htop to discover that.
htop is great, I've used it for a decade, but I didn't know you could hide the threads (Shift+H) until I read this today.
A "View options" / "Advanced" menu item on the bottom bar would help discover these option exists.
I also pressed some key, and some things turned purple, and there's no indication what view is shown, what the purple colour means, and what to do to turn it off.
I didn't know you could click in htop until today; it even works through tmux in mosh without any special configuration.
I think there's a lot to learn in the design philosophy of giving the power to users by default, but if you don't give your users the tools to learn this power they're going to have to ask questions if they want to yield it
This was my biggest take-away from the article too. It never occurred to me to even try interacting with a CLI application with my mouse.
I'd appreciate it if more developers considered 'discoverability' as a core part of their design philosophy. I think the author is close, but when you need to ask someone/search 'why is this green?' that's enough of a barrier that most people won't bother asking (or it'll be a small enough issue that they don't consciously notice it).
There's even a generally accepted solution for explaining semantic colours, a legend. Might be nice to have one down with the F-keys.
There is "F1 Help" in the bottom bar which lists these options, but not in much detail, so it's probably not enough for someone not experience with the tool.
For example, I missed that they use capital and non-capital letters: H (shift+h) toggles the threads, but i sat there opening/closing the help screen by pressing just h. Careful reading of the help screen would have prevented that. As none of the same lowercase/capital letters are next to each other, it is easy to miss.
"View options" are in Setup menu, which is mentioned in the article.
To be quite honest, I don't know any of the keys not mentioned in F-list at the bottom other than space and I think k, everything was always through Setup Menu.
On the other hand I casually looked through settings and found it immediately looking for something entirely different. Settings have a not overwhelming amount of lines each page so a quick glance led me to set whatever I wanted in the first place and things I found out by opportunity
Thanks for sharing that, now I know that I'm not the only one who has been using htop for years and didn't know that you could hide the threads with Shift+H. It's not even on the help screen, for crying out loud :D
Plus, after looking through all the options, I couldn't find an option to hide threads by default. EDIT: later I realized that pressing Shift+H automatically sets the option "Hide userland process threads", and I overlooked it because I was looking for a disabled option. So htop was actually smarter than I was giving it credit for. However, it definitely wouldn't hurt to mention Shift+H on the help screen :)
Ah, I swear I looked at the list three times until I finally found it. It's not listed under "Shift+H", it's under "H" (capital H = Shift+H). If they had a shortcut "Shift+1", they would probably rather look up the keyboard mapping to find out what character that is rather than writing "Shift+1". I still think htop is a great little tool, but sometimes it's really too clever for its own good...
'Purple' sounds like the 'Display options>Merge exe, comm and cmdline in Command' setting, hotkey-able with `m`. Yeah, echo'ing to the UI which hotkey was just activated could be helpful.
I wonder if the author's remark suggests a culture where the developer and their users are talking to each other more, and on more equal footing. Not always realistic, not always welcome by the grumpier ones, but certainly more hackerlike.
That's because there isn't a easy way in htop to discover that.
htop is great, I've used it for a decade, but I didn't know you could hide the threads (Shift+H) until I read this today.
A "View options" / "Advanced" menu item on the bottom bar would help discover these option exists.
I also pressed some key, and some things turned purple, and there's no indication what view is shown, what the purple colour means, and what to do to turn it off.