btop for MacOS is an Excellent Terminal System Resource Monitor

If you’re a command line enthusiast and you’re the type of Mac user who likes to keep an eye on your system resources and resource utilization, you’ll likely enjoy checking out the btop command. btop offers real-time visualization of CPU usage, memory use, processes, network activity, and disk activity. You can even use btop as a task manager, and kill processes directly from within btop, making btop kind of like Activity Monitor, but for the Terminal.

The btop tool is open source and cross platform, so while we’re focusing on MacOS here, you can also install it on Linux or Windows.

We’re going to assume you’re already familiar with the command line, and that you have Homebrew already on the Mac. If you don’t yet have Homebrew installed, you can easily get it in macOS Tahoe 26 or newer via the command line or a package installer, and we’ll offer the command line approach below too.

How to Install btop on macOS with Homebrew

Homebrew provides the easiest and fastest method of installing btop on macOS. You need to make sure that you have Homebrew, the command line package manager, installed first. If you don’t, no worries, it’s finished in a quick step.

Open the Terminal app to begin

You can access Terminal through Spotlight, or from the /Applications/Utilities/ folder.

1: Make Sure Homebrew is installed / updated

Before beginning, make sure Homebrew is installed on the Mac. If the brew command works, obviously it’s installed. If you do not yet have Homebrew installed, you can run the following command in Terminal:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

When finished installing, or if you already have Homebrew installed, you’ll want to update Homebrew for best practices:

brew update

2: Install btop with Homebrew

Now it’s time to install btop, which is done through the standard installation command with Homebrew:

brew install btop

3: Run btop in Terminal

Run the following command to start btop:

btop

You’ll immediately be presented with the lovely system resource monitor within the Terminal window:

Once you are in btop, you can use the highlighted keys to interact with the system monitor, navigate processes, filter processes, quit processes, and more.

btop is a robust, cleanly designed terminal tool that offers a visually pleasing and super efficient way to monitor CPU, memory, disk activity, network activity, and general process activity on macOS, and you can also use it as a task manager to kill processes. If you’re a longtime top or htop user, or even familiar with asitop, it’s worth trying out btop as it integrates seamlessly into any power users daily workflow. Even if you prefer the GUI and are comfortable with Activity Monitor, it’s well worth venturing into the Terminal and getting accustomed with command line tools, and btop offers a nice little reason to dive in for newcomers.