Show HN: Htop 2.0 released, now cross-platform
This is htop, a cross-platform interactive process viewer. It is a text-mode application (for console or X terminals) and requires ncurses.
Visit hisham.hm → On Hacker News Feb 2016 – Jan 2021
Software Engineering 3Open Source 1Life, Learning & Writing 1History & Retro Computing 1Design & UX 1
This is htop, a cross-platform interactive process viewer. It is a text-mode application (for console or X terminals) and requires ncurses.
This short story is not really about htop, or about the feature request that I’ll use as an illustration, but about what are the core principles that drive the development of a bit of software, down to every last detail. And by “core principles” I really mean it.
André Garzia made a nice blog post called “Lua, a misunderstood language” recently, and unfortunately (but perhaps unsurprisingly) a bulk of HN comments on it was about the age-old 0-based vs. 1-based indexing debate. You see, Lua uses 1-based indexing, and lots of programmers claimed this is unnatural because “every…