TopHat aims to be an elegant system resource monitor for the GNOME shell. It displays CPU, memory, disk, and network activity in the GNOME top bar.
This is the current development branch of TopHat. I'm in the process of re-writing this extension with the following goals:
- Port to TypeScript to improve reliability
- Remove glibtop as a required dependency
- Generally cleanup the code to improve maintainability
As of today, this branch is mostly working, but not quite as customizable as the current stable release of TopHat.
See RELEASES.md for the list of fixes and new functionality included in each release.
Install TopHat from the GNOME Shell extensions page.
- GNOME 45 or newer (older releases of TopHat are available for GNOME 3.32 - 44 in the legacy branch at https://github.com/fflewddur/tophat/tree/legacy)
- A modestly recent release of the Linux kernel (anything >= 5.0 should work)
The latest release of TopHat has been tested on the following systems:
- Arch Linux
- Debian Trixie
- Fedora 40
- Fedora 41
- Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
- Ubuntu 24.10
Even if your system is not in this list, as long as it meets the requirements mentioned above, you should be able to run TopHat. If not, please file a bug report on the issue tracker.
If you prefer not to use https://extensions.gnome.org to install and update
GNOME Shell extensions, you can manually install TopHat by following these
steps. You may need to install the unzip and gnome-extensions-app
utilities first.
- Download the latest TopHat release from https://github.com/fflewddur/tophat/releases.
- Ensure your local extension directory exists by running the command
mkdir -p ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/tophat@fflewddur.github.io. - Extract the TopHat ZIP file into your local extension directory with the
command
unzip [path-to-tophat.zip] -d ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/tophat@fflewddur.github.io - Log out of your computer and log back in (or restart your system).
- Enable TopHat in the
gnome-extensions-app.
Contributions to improve TopHat are welcome! To avoid duplicate work, check the issue tracker first. If an issue doesn't already exist for your idea, please create one.
TopHat uses Yarn to manage dependencies and define development tasks. Learn how to install Yarn at https://yarnpkg.com/getting-started/install.
yarn: Install project dependencies.
yarn build: Build the project.
yarn lint: Check for common problems.
yarn lint:fix: Fix common problems found by ESLint.
yarn format: Run Prettier to keep the project's coding style consistent.
To keep the code format consistent, please use run yarn lint && yarn format
before submitting a PR. If you use VS Code, I recommend installing the
ESLint and Prettier extensions to automatically run these tools for you.
To view logs for GNOME Shell: journalctl -f /usr/bin/gnome-shell
To view logs for extension preferences: journalctl -f /usr/bin/gjs
To simulate heavy system load, use the stress-ng tool, e.g. stress-ng --timeout 10s --cpu 8 or stress-ng --vm-bytes 80% --vm-populate -t 30 -vm 4.
To test the development version:
cd [path to tophat repo]
yarn build
mkdir -p ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/
ln -s [path to tophat repo]/dist ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/tophat@fflewddur.github.io
TopHat is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later. See the license file for details.
TopHat was designed and written by Todd Kulesza, with much inspiration from the GNOME system-monitor extension and iStat Menus.
The images in the 'icons' directory are derived works from thenounproject.com and used under the Creative Commons Attribution license. The authors of each original work are:
icons/cpu.svg: jai
icons/disk.svg: guntur cahya
icons/logo.svg: Sergey Krivoy
icons/mem.svg: Loudoun Design
Co.
icons/net.svg: Pixel Bazaar
All icons were edited to make them more legible at small sizes.
