Like htop, but for your AI coding agents — monitor Claude Code, Codex CLI, and OpenCode sessions, tokens, context windows, rate limits, and orphan ports all from one terminal screen.
abtop brings the familiar real-time dashboard experience of btop to the world of AI coding agents. Instead of tracking CPU and memory processes, it surfaces the metrics that matter when you have multiple AI agents running in parallel: token consumption, context window fill percentage, current task, model in use, rate limit windows, and any child processes or ports the agent has spawned.
Session discovery is entirely local and read-only. abtop scans your filesystem for Claude Code session files under ~/.claude, Codex CLI state, and OpenCode’s SQLite database — no API keys, no outbound connections, no authentication required. Multiple Claude profiles and config roots are auto-discovered, so teams with separate work and personal profiles see everything in one view.
The TUI is built with Ratatui and renders at 500ms intervals, giving you live sparklines of token rates, per-session context-window gauges with compaction warnings, and a subagent tree that shows nested agent spawns in real time. When running inside tmux, pressing Enter jumps directly to the terminal pane of the selected session. You can also kill stale sessions or orphaned ports without leaving the monitor.
abtop ships as both a binary and a Rust library crate, so other tools can embed its data-collection layer in-process and receive the same serializable snapshot the TUI renders — without re-scanning or spawning subprocesses. A reference web UI (abtop-web-ui) already consumes this API to expose the same data as a local-first browser dashboard.
--json) for scripting and integration with local web dashboards--json output to pipe live session data into custom dashboards or alerting toolsArchitecture
abtop follows a clean collector/app/UI layering that separates concerns across three tiers. Platform-specific session discovery lives in dedicated collector modules (Claude, Codex, OpenCode), each implementing a common trait; the MultiCollector aggregates them into a unified session list that the App struct owns. App is explicitly not Send, keeping all mutable state on one thread and forcing external consumers to communicate via serialized JSON snapshots rather than shared references. This design makes the binary and library crate surfaces completely independent: the TUI path drives App::tick() from the event loop, while headless consumers call App::tick_no_summaries() and serialize via App::to_snapshot(), never touching Ratatui at all.
Tech Stack
abtop is written entirely in Rust 2021 edition, targeting stable toolchains 1.88 and above. The terminal UI is built on Ratatui 0.29 with Crossterm 0.28 handling raw-mode terminal setup and keyboard/mouse event dispatch. Serialization uses Serde with serde_json for both the --json output path and the library snapshot API. Platform-specific process introspection relies on proc_pidinfo on macOS, sysinfo on Windows, and direct /proc parsing via libc on Linux — each conditionally compiled with Cargo’s cfg feature flags. Config is stored in TOML at ~/.config/abtop/config.toml via the dirs crate for XDG-compliant path resolution. Distribution is handled through cargo-dist with pre-built installers for macOS, Linux, and Windows, alongside standard cargo install support.
Code Quality
The codebase demonstrates solid Rust idioms throughout: exhaustive pattern matching on enums, Option/Result propagation with minimal unwrapping in library paths, and explicit sanitize_output functions to defend against Trojan Source (CVE-2021-42574) style attacks via Unicode bidi override characters. Tests are present across collector modules, the snapshot layer, UI logic, and theme parsing — covering the session discovery logic, rate limit parsing, and click-target resolution. There is no CI configuration visible in the shallow clone, but the Cargo workspace uses profile.dist with thin LTO for release builds and the README references a dist-workspace.toml, suggesting a release automation pipeline. Comment density is moderate; public API surface and the library crate entry point carry thorough documentation with usage examples.
What Makes It Unique Most developer monitoring tools either require daemon processes, API credentials, or inject instrumentation into the target application. abtop takes the opposite approach: it reads entirely from local filesystem artifacts that AI coding agents already produce — session JSON files, transcript logs, process open-file descriptors, and SQLite databases — making it zero-setup and zero-trust. The dual binary/library architecture is particularly novel: because the data-collection layer is exposed as a first-class Rust crate, third-party tools like abtop-web-ui can embed it in-process and serialize the exact same snapshot the TUI renders, without re-implementing discovery or polling abtop as a subprocess. The tmux pane-jump integration, orphan port detection, and colorblind-accessible theme set also stand out as thoughtful additions that go beyond basic process monitoring.
abtop is released under the MIT License, one of the most permissive open-source licenses available. You are free to use it commercially, modify the source, redistribute it, and incorporate it into proprietary products with no copyleft obligations. The only requirement is that the copyright notice and license text be included in any distributed copy of the software. There are no CLA requirements, contributor agreements, or dual-licensing restrictions.
Running abtop operationally is extremely low overhead. It is a single statically-linked binary with no runtime dependencies, no daemon, no database, and no network connectivity. Deploying it means copying one file; uninstalling means deleting it. The tool reads only local filesystem state that already exists on developer machines, so there is no setup phase and no configuration required beyond optionally editing a single TOML file. There are no upgrades to coordinate across a fleet — each developer manages their own copy independently, and the --update flag or cargo install abtop --force brings any installation current in seconds.
Because abtop is entirely free and open source with no paid tier or hosted service, there is no managed alternative to compare against. What you get from the community-maintained version is identical to what any commercial offering would be, since none exists. Support is community-driven through GitHub Issues, and bug fixes depend on maintainer and contributor availability rather than SLAs. Teams that need guaranteed response times or enterprise support contracts would need to arrange those independently through consulting or internal fork maintenance, as there is no commercial backing behind this project.
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