bottom/docs/content/configuration/config-file/processes.md

Processes Configuration

Settings

If you want to change some of the default behaviour of the processes widget, you can configure some things in the config file.

Field	Type	Functionality
get_threads	Boolean	Gather process thread information.
hide_k_threads	Boolean	Hide kernel threads from being shown. Linux only.
tree_collapse	Boolean	Collapse the process tree by default when tree mode is set.
process_command	Boolean	Shows the full command name instead of the process name by default.
disable_advanced_kill	Boolean	Disable the advanced kill dialog and just show the basic one with no options. Linux, macOS, FreeBSD only.
default_memory_value	Boolean	Defaults to showing process memory usage by value.
default_grouped	Boolean	Groups processes with the same name by default. No effect if --tree is set.
regex	Boolean	Enables regex by default while searching.
case_sensitive	Boolean	Enables case sensitivity by default when searching.
whole_word	Boolean	Enables whole-word matching by default while searching.
default_tree	Boolean	Makes the process widget use tree mode by default.
current_usage	Boolean	Calculates process CPU usage as a percentage of current usage rather than total usage.
unnormalized_cpu	Boolean	Show process CPU% usage without averaging over the number of CPU cores.

Columns

You can configure which columns are shown by the process widget by setting the columns setting:

[processes]
# Pick which columns you want to use in any order.
columns = ["cpu%", "mem%", "pid", "name", "read", "write", "tread", "twrite", "state", "user", "time", "gmem%", "gpu%"]

Default Sort Column

By default, the process widget starts sorted by CPU usage in descending order. You can change the column it sorts by at startup:

[processes]
default_sort = "mem"

Any of the column names accepted by columns work here (e.g. "cpu%", "mem", "pid", "name", "read"). If the column you pick is not actually shown by the widget, the built-in default is used instead.

The same setting is also exposed as a CLI flag, which takes precedence over the config file:

btm --process_default_sort mem

You can also set the default order by changing processes.sort_order with "Ascending" or "Descending". If not set, then by default, it will use a sort order that is reasonable (e.g. descending for CPU/memory usage, ascending for process names).

[processes]
sort_order = "Ascending"