hishamhm / htop

htop is an interactive text-mode process viewer for Unix systems. It aims to be a better 'top'.
GNU General Public License v2.0
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Don't highlight selection after a timeout #1008

Open sphonks opened 4 years ago

sphonks commented 4 years ago

Highlighting of the currently selected row prevents the use of colour to differentiate threads and kernel processes from other processes, as well as preventing the highlighting of the program 'basename', memory kB/MB distinction, etc.. By default, the highlight position is the row at the top of the list, meaning most often the one with highest CPU or memory usage. It defeats the purpose of using colours, as they only apply to all but the 'most important' process.

Additionally, it would seem that the current behaviour is to freeze the order or processes for a few seconds when the user moves the selection.

So why not highlight the selection during said amount of time only. After that, don't highlight anything until the user interacts with htop again, allowing for a cleaner a more readable list of processes.

I should point out that when the order is not frozen (i.e most of the time), the process corresponding to the highlighted position will be constantly changing based on the ordering. Therefore there is no point in having it highlighted at all, since no user should try to act upon the selection before freezing the list again, by first moving the selection.

If a time-based approach is a problem, a quick workaround could be to only highlight the selection's PID column, or any column for which the colour carries no information.