htop Meters

The meters at the top of htop (CPU, Mem, Swp, Tasks and Uptime) in ASCII, in a section of the VS Code side bar.

  0[|||||||  45.5%]  4[||        8.0%]
  1[|||||||  40.0%]  5[||        3.0%]
  2[|||||||  43.0%]  6[|         2.0%]
  3[||||||   38.4%]  7[||        2.0%]
Mem[||||||||||||||||||||||||6.32G/8.00G]
Swp[||||||||||||||||||||||||2.02G/3.00G]
Tasks: 475, 2843 thr; 7 running
Uptime: 56 days, 06:08:50

What it shows

• CPU: one bar per core: blue = nice, green = user, red = kernel. The bars go in two columns when the side bar is wide enough.
• Mem:
  • on macOS, as in Activity Monitor: green = app memory, blue = wired, magenta = compressed, yellow = cached files. The number is the memory used (app + wired + compressed).
  • on Linux, as in htop: green = used, blue = buffers, magenta = shared, yellow = cache, from /proc/meminfo.
• Swp: swap used (sysctl vm.swapusage on macOS, /proc/meminfo on Linux).
• Tasks: processes, threads and running threads (ps -A -M on macOS, /proc on Linux).
• Uptime: how long the computer has been on.

The colors come from the terminal palette of the active theme, so they match your integrated terminal. The meters update only while the section is open and visible.

Where it appears

The htop section appears at the bottom of the Explorer, Source Control, Run and Debug, Testing and the Claude Code sessions list. Collapse it or hide it (right-click on the side bar's title) where you don't want it. Only the copy you can see updates, so having it in several places costs nothing.

Settings

Platforms

macOS and Linux show every meter. On Windows only CPU, the total memory used and Uptime are shown.

In a remote window (SSH, WSL, Dev Containers) the extension runs on the remote machine, so the meters are the remote machine's.

Installation

From the Marketplace: open the Extensions view (Cmd+Shift+X / Ctrl+Shift+X), search for htop Meters and click Install, or open its Marketplace page.

From Open VSX (VSCodium, Cursor, Windsurf and other editors): search for htop Meters in the Extensions view, or download it from open-vsx.org.

From a .vsix: download it from the releases, then in the Extensions view open the … menu → Install from VSIX…, or:

code --install-extension htop-meters-<version>.vsix

Build

npm install
npm run package

License

MIT — see LICENSE.md.