Want to keep an eye on your system resources without pulling up a terminal or launching GNOME’s System Monitor tool?
Check out TopHat.
TopHat is a new system monitor GNOME extension that puts a top-level overview of active CPU, RAM, and network usages in the GNOME Shell top bar.
There are, of course, ample system monitor GNOME extensions out there. Heck, I feel like I’ve written about them all at some point. But most tend to be singular, putting a wealth of system resource info within a two column table.
TopHat is a bit more focused.
Instead of giving you a single pop-over with a terse overview of system resources relayed solely through percentages, TopHat embeds three live, updating processor, memory, and network graphs directly in to the top bar itself.
Clicking on a mini-graph reveals a pop over where you can see a larger, more detailed graph as well as a live, updating overview of the top six processes using that resource type.
Install Tophat GNOME Extension
Want to try it out? You can install TopHat from the GNOME extensions website.
If you’re on Ubuntu the easiest way to install (manage, and configure) GNOME extensions is to install the gnome-shell-extension-manager app from the repos. Form that tool his ‘browse’ and search for ‘tophat’ (no space) to find it.
There are a few requisites required to use this add-on: you need to be on GNOME 3.38 or higher, and you need to have libgtop and gir1.2-gtop-2.0 installed on your system.
The former is a regular part of Ubuntu, but the latter you can apt get from the command line (if you install the dependency after installing and enabling TopHat you will need to log-out and back in).
At the time of writing (July 25) this extension does not have any settings so you can’t, for example, only show the CPU graph and hide the others. The extension also doesn’t play nice with Yaru’s light theme, but works great in dark mode.