cosmotop is a system monitoring tool distributed as a single executable for multiple platforms. A fork of btop++ and built with Cosmopolitan Libc.

Installation

Download cosmotop.exe from GitHub releases. Place it anywhere and run!

Linux troubleshooting

Some Linux systems might be configured to launch Windows-like executables in a specific way, such as under WINE or with WSLInterop, while others may error with a message like "run-detectors: unable to find an interpreter". In such cases, register the file format that cosmotop uses with the following:

sudo wget -O /usr/bin/ape https://cosmo.zip/pub/cosmos/bin/ape-$(uname -m).elf
sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/ape
sudo sh -c "echo ':APE:M::MZqFpD::/usr/bin/ape:' >/proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/register"
sudo sh -c "echo ':APE-jart:M::jartsr::/usr/bin/ape:' >/proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/register"

Usage

Usage: cosmotop [OPTIONS]

Options:
  -h,  --help          show this help message and exit
  -v,  --version       show version info and exit
  -lc, --low-color     disable truecolor, converts 24-bit colors to 256-color
  -t,  --tty_on        force (ON) tty mode, max 16 colors and tty friendly graph symbols
  +t,  --tty_off       force (OFF) tty mode
  -p,  --preset <id>   start with preset, integer value between 0-9
  -u,  --update <ms>   set the program update rate in milliseconds
       --utf-force     force start even if no UTF-8 locale was detected
       --debug         start in DEBUG mode: shows microsecond timer for information collect
                       and screen draw functions and sets loglevel to DEBUG

Configuration

The configuration file for cosmotop is stored at ~/.config/cosmotop/cosmotop.conf, populated with defaults the first time the program runs.

GPU monitoring

Documentation coming soon!

Supported platforms

cosmotop supports the following operating systems and architectures:

• Linux 2.6.18+ (x86_64 and aarch64)
• MacOS 13+ (x86_64 and aarch64)
• Windows 10+ (x86_64)
• FreeBSD 13+ (x86_64 and aarch64)
• NetBSD 10.0+ (x86_64)
• OpenBSD 7.3 (x86_64)

How it works

cosmotop uses Cosmopolitan Libc and the Actually Portable Executable file format to create a single executable capable of running on multiple operating systems and architectures. This multiplatform executable contains code to draw the terminal UI and handle generic systems metrics, like processes, memory, disk, etc. On Windows, the executable runs natively. On UNIX, the executable will self-extract a small loader binary to run the program.

Collecting real data from the underlying system is done by helper plugins, which are built for each target platform using host-native compilers and libraries. These plugins are then bundled into cosmotop.exe and extracted out onto the host under the path ~/.cosmotop, and are used at runtime to gather system metrics that are then displayed by the primary multiplatform executable process in the terminal.

Building from source

cosmotop is built with CMake. Both the multiplatform host executable and platform-native plugins can be built with the CMakeLists.txt at the root of this repository, but they must be built with separate CMake invocations due to the usage of different compilers.

Building the multiplatform "host" executable

Download the cosmocc toolchain (cosmocc-X.Y.Z.zip) from the Cosmopolitan GitHub releases and extract it somewhere on your filesystem. Add the bin directory to PATH to ensure the compilers can be found. For best results, compile this part on Linux.

On Linux, it may be needed to modify binfmt_misc to run the cosmocc toolchain.

export CC=cosmocc
export CXX=cosmoc++
cmake -B build-host -DTARGET=host
cmake --build build
# or: cmake --build build --parallel

This should produce a cosmotop.com binary.

Building platform-native "plugin" binaries

Platform-native binaries are built as shared libraries on MacOS (aarch64), Windows, and FreeBSD, and as executables on Linux, MacOS (x86_64), NetBSD, and OpenBSD. Plugins are built as executables on platforms where Cosmopolitan is unable to reliably load native shared libraries, or when building an executable provides greater distro compatibility (e.g. Linux plugins are statically linked with musl libc). To tell CMake to build plugins, use -DTARGET=plugin, which automatically selects whether to build a shared library or an executable.

cmake -B build-plugin -DTARGET=plugin
cmake --build build
# or: cmake --build build --parallel

This should produce a libcosmotop-plugin.[so|dylib], cosmotop-plugin.dll, or cosmotop-plugin.exe. Rename it to one of the following, matching the target platform:

cosmotop-linux-x86_64.exe
cosmotop-linux-aarch64.exe
cosmotop-macos-x86_64.exe
cosmotop-macos-aarch64.dylib
cosmotop-windows-x86_64.dll
cosmotop-freebsd-x86_64.so
cosmotop-freebsd-aarch64.so
cosmotop-netbsd-x86_64.exe
cosmotop-openbsd-x86_64.exe

Bundling everything together

The plugin binaries can be added to cosmotop.com with zip, for example:

zip cosmotop.com cosmotop-linux-x86_64.exe

Themes can also be bundled:

zip -r cosmotop.com themes/

Optionally, rename cosmotop.com to cosmotop.exe.

Licensing

Unless otherwise stated, the code in this repository is licensed under Apache-2.0.

cosmotop also relies on the following list of external libraries:

• Cosmopolitan Libc and LLVM libcxx/compiler-rt: ISC, MIT, Apache-2.0, etc.
• libcosmo_plugin and dependencies: MIT, Apache-2.0
• fmt: MIT
• widecharwidth: CC0-1.0
• range-v3: Boost Software License, MIT, etc.
• cpp-httplib: MIT
• LibreHardwareMonitor, CppExport, and dependencies: MPL-2.0, Apache-2.0