Tag Archives: mac

Make OSX’s top behave like Linux’s top

OSX’s top program doesn’t quite behave like its Linux counterpart out of the box. For me, the two biggest problems are that processes aren’t sorted by CPU usage and the top program itself uses 10% of the CPU because it calculates all sorts of statistics about memory and shared library usage that I personally don’t care about.

There are a series of flags that you can pass to OSX’s top to have its behavior be closer to Linux’s top. I have created the following alias to that effect :

alias mytop='top -s1 -o cpu -R -F'

The display is updated every second, processes sorted by CPU usage and no unnecessary statistics are calculated. Instead of 10%, top uses only 2% of the CPU.

Useful free Mac apps

I’m a relatively new Mac user so I’m keeping a list of some useful free apps that I’m using on my Mac. It’s a work in progress…

  • Instant Messaging : Adium
  • PDF Annotation : Skim
  • Notes taking : Freemind
  • Linux package manager : Macports (lots of my friends use fink)
  • EquationService : Create equations from latex that can be used in Keynote
  • MacFUSE : MacFUSE is software that allows you to write arbitrary file systems as user-space programs
  • Creative MP3 Player support : XNJB
  • OSX Ext2 Filesystem
  • Switch : Audio file converter
  • Cyberduck : SFTP/FTP
  • Espérance DV : Create a ramdisk