killa 🔪

Killa is a GUI process monitor written in Rust, targeted for Linux desktops. The primary goals are to be fast, be simple, and keyboard-driven, while being usable with mouse too. Works on Wayland and X.

tech: Iced (frontend) + Bottom (backend)

Why another system monitor?

I wanted a desktop system monitor with looks and UX of gnome-system-monitor, but with faster statup times. I couldn't find any other UI system monitor that I like (including many terminal ones like atop, btop, htop, glances, etc.). So I've wrote my own.

For reference, I mainly use process monitors to kill processes, and so killa was made with optimizing workflow of killing processes in mind.

Gnome System Monitor startup times are around ~3-5s for me on NixOS, while killa is ~500ms.

Status

All essential features are implemented. It is usable to the point that 99% of the time I no longer need to use other process monitors. No more significant features are planned at this point in time.

Features

• Instant startup time (~500ms on my system)
• Shows a list of processes, sorted by CPU usage, refreshed every 1s
• Shows total memory usage %
• Advanced searching:
  • Ctrl+F to focus search field.
  • Case-insensitive.
  • Terms split by spaces.
  • Prefix with - to revert the filter.
  • Search in specific by column using prefixes: name, pid, cmd, any (default). Examples:
    • name:nix
    • pid:1
    • cmd:chrome
    • any:test:123 (searches for literal "test:123")
    • can be combined with - like this: -pid:1
• Allows killing processes (you can press Esc at any step to cancel)
  1. Filter/search processes (at least 3 chars)
  2. Ctrl+J to freeze. This stops the search results from updating.
  3. Ctrl+K to stage SIGTERM / Ctrl+Shift+K to stage SIGKILL.
  4. Press Enter to actually send the staged signal to all filtered processes.

Installation

The primary way to install is to use Nix with flakes:

# flake.nix
{
  inputs = {
    nixpkgs.url = "github:NixOS/nixpkgs/nixos-unstable";
    home-manager.url = "github:nix-community/home-manager";
    killa.url = "github:rszyma/killa";
  };

  outputs = { nixpkgs, ... } @ inputs: {
    # set up for NixOS
    nixosConfigurations.HOSTNAME = nixpkgs.lib.nixosSystem {
      specialArgs = { inherit inputs; };
      modules = [ ./configuration.nix ];
    };

    # or for Home Manager
    homeConfigurations.HOSTNAME = inputs.home-manager.lib.homeManagerConfiguration {
      pkgs = import nixpkgs { inherit system; };
      extraSpecialArgs = { inherit inputs; };
      modules = [ ./home.nix ];
    }
  }
}

Then, add the package:

{ pkgs, inputs, ... }:
{
  environment.systemPackages = [ # or home.packages
    inputs.killa.packages.${pkgs.system}.default
  ];
}