pstop: I built htop for Windows in Rust

pstop: htop for Windows PowerShell

If you've ever wanted htop on Windows without WSL or Cygwin, that's exactly what pstop does. It's a real time system monitor built in Rust that runs in your terminal.

Install

cargo install pstop

This installs both pstop and htop commands. Yes, you can type htop on Windows.

Don't have Rust? Install it from rustup.rs (takes about 30 seconds).

What it does

Header:

Per core CPU bars, color coded by usage type (user/system/virtual)
Memory bar showing used, buffers, cached
Swap bar with usage threshold
Network bar with live RX/TX throughput

Process table:

PID, USER, CPU%, MEM%, TIME+, Command
Sort by any column (click header or F6)
Search (F3) and filter (F4) in real time

Views:

Main: full process table
I/O: disk read/write rates per process
Net: network focused view

Tree view:
Press F5 to see parent/child process hierarchy with collapsible nodes.

F2 Setup menu:

Meters: configure header layout
Display Options: 14 toggleable settings
Colors: 7 built in schemes with live preview
Columns: add/remove/reorder visible columns

Color schemes

Default (classic htop green/cyan)
Monochrome
Black Night
Light Terminal
Midnight Commander
Black on White
Dark Vivid

Performance

~1 MB single binary (release build with LTO + strip)
50ms event polling
Configurable refresh rate (200ms to 10s)
Native Win32 API calls
Zero runtime dependencies

Tech stack

Rust
ratatui 0.29 (TUI framework)
crossterm 0.28 (terminal backend)
sysinfo 0.33 (system information)
windows 0.58 (native Win32 APIs)

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