TopHat

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.

Screenshot of
TopHat

News

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.

Release notes

See RELEASES.md for the list of fixes and new functionality included in each release.

Installation

Install TopHat from the GNOME Shell extensions page.

Requirements

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)

Compatibility

The latest release of TopHat has been tested on the following systems:

Arch Linux
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.

Manual installation

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.

Contributing

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.

Useful development commands

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

License

TopHat is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later. See the license file for details.

Credits

TopHat was designed and written by Todd Kulesza, with much inspiration from the GNOME system-monitor extension and iStat Menus.

Icons

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.

fflewddur / tophat

readme