TopHat

TopHat aims to be an elegant system resource monitor for the GNOME shell. It displays CPU, memory, disk, and network activity in the GNOME top bar.

<img src="./screenshots/tophat.png?raw=true" width="1080px" alt="Screenshot of TopHat">

Release notes

See RELEASES.md for the list of fixes and new functionality included in each release.

Installation

Install TopHat from the GNOME Shell extensions page.

Requirements

• GNOME 45 or newer (older releases of TopHat are available for GNOME 3.32 - 44 in the legacy branch at https://github.com/fflewddur/tophat/tree/legacy)
• A modestly recent release of the Linux kernel (anything >= 5.0 should work)
• NetworkManager (to monitor network devices)

Compatibility

The latest release of TopHat has been tested on the following systems:

• Arch Linux
• Debian Trixie
• Fedora 42
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10
• Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
• Ubuntu 25.04

Even if your system is not in this list, as long as it meets the requirements mentioned above, you should be able to run TopHat. If not, please file a bug report on the issue tracker.

Manual installation

If you prefer not to use https://extensions.gnome.org to install and update GNOME Shell extensions, you can manually install TopHat by following these steps. You may need to install the unzip and gnome-extensions-app utilities first.

1. Download the latest TopHat release from https://github.com/fflewddur/tophat/releases.
2. Ensure your local extension directory exists by running the command mkdir -p ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/tophat@fflewddur.github.io.
3. Extract the TopHat ZIP file into your local extension directory with the command unzip [path-to-tophat.zip] -d ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/tophat@fflewddur.github.io
4. Log out of your computer and log back in (or restart your system).
5. Enable TopHat with the command gnome-extensions enable tophat@fflewddur.github.io.

Settings

All of TopHat's settings are displayed in its preferences window, and this is the recommended approach for modifying them. If, however, you need to work with these from the command like, you can use the gsettings tools to read and modify them. To view all available settings and their current values, use the command:

gsettings --schemadir ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/tophat@fflewddur.github.io/schemas list-recursively org.gnome.shell.extensions.tophat

Settings can be adjusted with the command:

gsettings --schemadir ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/tophat@fflewddur.github.io/schemas set org.gnome.shell.extensions.tophat [key] [value]

Contributing

Contributions to improve TopHat are welcome! To avoid duplicate work, check the issue tracker first. If an issue doesn't already exist for your idea, please create one.

TopHat uses Yarn to manage dependencies and define development tasks. Learn how to install Yarn at https://yarnpkg.com/getting-started/install.

yarn: Install project dependencies.
yarn build: Build the project.
yarn lint: Check for common problems.
yarn lint:fix: Fix common problems found by ESLint.
yarn format: Run Prettier to keep the project's coding style consistent.

To keep the code format consistent, please use run yarn lint && yarn format before submitting a PR. If you use VS Code, consider installing the ESLint and Prettier extensions to automatically run these tools for you.

Useful development commands

To view logs for GNOME Shell:

journalctl -f /usr/bin/gnome-shell

To view logs for extension preferences:

journalctl -f /usr/bin/gjs

To simulate heavy system load, use the stress-ng tool, e.g.:

stress-ng --timeout 10s --cpu 8
stress-ng --vm-bytes 80% --vm-populate -t 30 -vm 4

To test the development version:

cd [path to tophat repo]
yarn build
mkdir -p ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/
ln -s [path to tophat repo]/dist ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/tophat@fflewddur.github.io

License

TopHat is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later. See the license file for details.

Credits

TopHat was designed and written by Todd Kulesza, with much inspiration from the GNOME system-monitor extension and iStat Menus.

Icons

The images in the 'icons' directory are derived works from thenounproject.com and used under the Creative Commons Attribution license. The authors of each original work are:

icons/cpu.svg: jai
icons/disk.svg: guntur cahya
icons/logo.svg: Sergey Krivoy
icons/mem.svg: Loudoun Design Co.
icons/net.svg: Pixel Bazaar

All icons were edited to make them more legible at small sizes.