htop

If you spend a lot of time at the terminal, then you must try htop. This is a fully-featured interactive process viewer for the terminal. It shows a ASCII graph of CPU usage (one for each core!), memory usage, swap usage and a updated process list. To sort the processes by CPU, memory, or any other parameter, just click with the mouse on the corresponding column. Yes, you click with the mouse on the terminal! 😊

• Installing htop is easy:

$ sudo apt install htop

• To attach strace to a process: Select a process and press s, then you can scroll through the syscalls and filter them.

Tried with: htop 1.0.1 and Ubuntu 12.04