wrongtop

WrongTop

WrongTop is a cross-platform terminal system monitor for macOS, Linux and Windows. It watches CPU, memory, processes, disks, network, Docker containers, temperatures, fans and GPUs in a tabbed TUI with live braille charts — inspired by htop, btop and glances, built with Go, Bubble Tea v2 and gopsutil.

Features

• Single-screen overview (btop-style): the dashboard packs every major panel into one connected border frame — shared dividers, resolved junctions, per-panel colored titles — with host identity, CPU, memory/swap/zram, network, disks, GPUs and the busiest processes in a responsive grid
• Gradient meters — bars sweep the palette ramp across their length (CPU, memory, swap, zram, disks, GPUs, battery), btop-style, and process CPU% is colored along the same ramp
• Dashboard panels — host (OS, kernel, uptime, load average, logged-in users, temperatures, battery, fan speeds), total CPU with a scrolling braille graph, per-core usage bars and frequency, RAM/swap/zram bars with history, network down/up graphs with auto-scale ceilings labeled in the corners and glances-style mixed meters per interface (green share = download, blue share = upload), per-mount usage bars with aggregate I/O rates, and a top-process panel
• Sensors — CPU temperatures and fan RPMs on every platform it can get them: on macOS (arm64) WrongTop reads the AppleSMC directly via IOKit — real P-core temperatures that neither btop nor glances show on a Mac — plus battery state through IOPowerSources; Linux uses hwmon; Windows tries ACPI thermal zones and WMI
• GPU monitoring — utilization, VRAM and temperature through NVIDIA's NVML driver library, loaded at runtime (no cgo, no helper process); the panel appears only when a GPU exists
• Alerts with history (glances-style): active warnings surface as chips on the tab bar's right zone — visible on every tab, never reflowing the grid; critical chips pulse and long events carry their duration — and a (or clicking the zone) opens a timestamped session history with severities and durations
• Live status bar — threshold-colored cpu/mem chips, network throughput, temperature and battery at the bottom, btop-style; chips and hints degrade gracefully on narrow terminals so the line never wraps
• Process table — sortable, live-filterable list with PID, name, CPU%, MEM%, RSS, user, thread count, nice value and htop-style state letter; tree view with collapse/expand; a full signal menu (TERM, KILL, INT, HUP, QUIT, STOP, CONT); per-process detail box with the full command line
• Docker — container list with live CPU, memory, network and block I/O rates (computed from the lifetime counters), a CPU ACTIVITY meter column, health-aware status coloring, start / stop / restart; follow-mode log viewer with scrollback and severity coloring. The daemon is optional: the tab shows a notice and retries until it appears
• Disks — filesystem usage bars plus per-device read/write rates, IOPS, busy time and an ACTIVITY sparkline per device
• Network — per-interface throughput and totals, sorted by current activity, with per-interface ACTIVITY sparklines and a DROP/s column
• Sensors tab — one panel per hardware group: rolling temperature graphs per sensor, fan speeds with activity sparklines, and battery state with charge history
• Connections tab — the live TCP table sorted traffic-first (established, then listeners), per-state coloring, and process names resolved from the process table where the platform allows (macOS does; Linux reads the kernel tables without the expensive PID scan)
• Themes — ten built-in palettes (tokyo-night is the default, everforest-dark and kanagawa among them) plus user-defined theme files loaded from ~/.config/wrongtop/themes/*.yml; T cycles themes live without losing state
• Soft modern UI — chips, active tabs and alert chips blend their background toward the palette, every panel carries a border readout (title with icon on the left, the live value flush right — uptime on HOST, 45.2% · 55°C on CPU, R/W rates on DISKS…), nerd_fonts: true swaps the glyphs for nerd-font icons and powerline separators, and border: rounded | square | thick | double switches the panel corners btop-style
• Live config — R hot-reloads the YAML (theme, refresh, thresholds, layout, key bindings); p cycles dashboard density presets
• Remote monitoring — wrongtop serve streams snapshots to wrongtop connect clients over a token-authenticated, read-only protocol; wrongtop dump prints JSON lines for scripts
• Zero-config — runs fine without a config file; YAML overrides are optional
• Full mouse support — click to select rows and tabs, wheel to scroll — and alt-screen rendering, responsive from narrow terminals to full-screen grids

Installation

Requires Go 1.26+.

go install github.com/wrongstack/wrongtop/cmd/wrongtop@latest

Or build from source:

git clone https://github.com/wrongstack/wrongtop
cd wrongtop
make build   # or: go build -o wrongtop ./cmd/wrongtop

Building on macOS with CGO enabled (CGO_ENABLED=1, the default) links IOKit and unlocks AppleSMC temperatures, fan speeds and battery readings. A CGO_ENABLED=0 build works everywhere but skips those sensors.

Release binaries (macOS/Linux/Windows × amd64/arm64), a Homebrew tap and checksums are produced by goreleaser on every v* tag; darwin builds link IOKit, the rest stay cgo-free.

Usage

wrongtop                        # start the monitor
wrongtop -c config.yaml         # use a specific config file
wrongtop serve                  # stream snapshots to connect clients
wrongtop connect host:port      # watch a remote machine
wrongtop dump --count 5         # JSON snapshots to stdout
wrongtop version                # print the version
wrongtop config-sample          # print an annotated sample config

The config file can also be set with the WRONGTOP_CONFIG environment variable; otherwise ~/.config/wrongtop/config.yaml is used if present.

Remote monitoring

One machine runs the headless server; any number of clients watch it:

# on the machine to monitor — require a token, never run it open
WRONGTOP_TOKEN=choose-a-secret wrongtop serve --listen :61234

# from anywhere that can reach the port
WRONGTOP_TOKEN=choose-a-secret wrongtop connect server:61234

# scripts get the same data as JSON lines
WRONGTOP_TOKEN=choose-a-secret wrongtop connect …   # interactive
wrongtop dump --count 60                            # local JSON lines

The protocol is read-only by construction: clients authenticate with a constant-time token check and then only receive snapshot frames. Remote views disable the Docker tab, process signaling and command-line lookups — there is nothing to execute on the server.

Keybindings

Global (work on every tab):

Processes tab:

WrongTop refuses to signal its own process.

Dashboard tab:

Docker tab:

Disks tab:

Configuration

WrongTop works with no configuration. To customize, run wrongtop config-sample and start from the annotated output.

theme: tokyo-night       # 10 built-ins, or a file in ~/.config/wrongtop/themes
refresh: 1s               # sample interval, clamped to 250ms–10s
layout: full              # full | compact | minimal (p cycles it live)
nerd_fonts: false         # true: icon glyphs + powerline separators in tabs, panels and the status bar
border: rounded           # rounded | square | thick | double panel corners

modules:                  # optional tabs
  processes: true         # show the process table
  docker: true            # show the Docker tab
  sensors: true           # show the SENSORS tab (temps, fans, battery)
  connections: true       # show the CONNECTIONS tab (live TCP table)

thresholds:               # percent where values turn warning / critical
  cpu_warn: 70
  cpu_crit: 90
  mem_warn: 80
  mem_crit: 95
  temp_warn: 60           # CPU temperature °C (shown when the platform reports it)
  temp_crit: 80

keys:                     # processes-tab overrides (single letters)
  kill: k                 # opens the signal menu; uppercase presets SIGKILL
  filter: /

read_only: false          # true disables process signaling (also set on remote views)

Missing fields fall back to the defaults shown; a missing file is not an error.

Custom themes

Drop a YAML file into ~/.config/wrongtop/themes/ — the file name becomes the theme name (or set name:), any omitted color inherits the default palette:

# ~/.config/wrongtop/themes/ocean.yml
bg: "#0b1e2d"
fg: "#cfe3f5"
red: "#ff6b6b"
green: "#5fd39a"
yellow: "#f5d76e"
blue: "#5aa9e6"
purple: "#b58cd9"
cyan: "#6ed3e7"
orange: "#f0932b"
gray: "#5d7a94"

theme: ocean picks it up, and it joins the T cycle. Files that fail to parse are skipped.

Project layout

Development

make build   # build
make test    # run tests (-race)
make vet     # static checks
make cross   # all platform targets into dist/

Embed a version string at build time:

go build -ldflags "-X github.com/wrongstack/wrongtop/cmd/wrongtop.version=$(git describe --tags --always)" -o wrongtop ./cmd/wrongtop

Roadmap

• Dashboard: host, CPU, memory, swap, zram, sensors, fans, battery, GPUs
• Processes: filter, sort, tree view, detail box, signal menu
• Disks: filesystems and I/O rates
• Network: per-interface traffic
• Docker: containers, stats, actions, log streaming
• Remote monitoring: serve / connect / dump
• Container support beyond Docker (Podman, k8s)
• Exporters (InfluxDB, Prometheus) and web dashboard

License

MIT — see LICENSE.