Troubleshooting

The graph points look broken/strange

It's possible that your graphs won't look great out of the box due to the reliance on braille fonts.

One example of this is seeing a bunch of missing font characters, caused when the terminal isn't configured properly to render braille fonts.

Example of a terminal with no braille font. — Powershell shown missing braille fonts

Another example is when braille is rendered as a block of dots, with the non-coloured dots also appearing. This may look strange for some users, and it is also caused by misconfiguration or missing fonts.

Example of a terminal with the wrong braille font. — Braille fonts rendering as a block of dots

In either case, you may need to install a specific font and configure your terminal to use it. For example, installing UBraille and ensuring your terminal uses it should work.

Another alternative is to use the --dot_marker option to render graph charts using dots instead of the braille characters, which generally seems better supported out of the box, at the expense of looking less intricate:

Example of running bottom with the dot marker flag — Example using `btm --dot_marker`

Why can't I see all my processes/process usage on macOS?

You may have to run the program with elevated privileges - for example:

sudo btm

Please note that you should be certain that you trust any software you grant root privileges.

There are measures taken to try to maximize the amount of information obtained without elevated privileges, but there may still be some limitations.

My configuration file isn't working

If your configuration files aren't working, here are a few things to try:

Check the formatting

It may be handy to refer to the automatically generated config files or the sample configuration files. The config files also follow the TOML format.

Also make sure your config options are under the right table - for example, to set your temperature type, you must set it under the [flags] table:

[flags]
temperature_type = "f"

Meanwhile, if you want to set a custom color scheme, it would be under the [colors] table:

[colors]
table_header_color="LightBlue"

Check the configuration file location

Make sure bottom is reading the right configuration file. By default, bottom looks for config files at these locations:

OS	Default Config Location
macOS	`$HOME/Library/Application Support/bottom/bottom.toml` `~/.config/bottom/bottom.toml` `$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/bottom/bottom.toml`
Linux	`~/.config/bottom/bottom.toml` `$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/bottom/bottom.toml`
Windows	`C:\Users\<USER>\AppData\Roaming\bottom\bottom.toml`

If you want to use a config file in another location, use the --config or -C flags along with the path to the configuration file, like so:

btm -C path_to_config

My installation through snap has some widgets that are blank/show no data

Make sure bottom is given the correct permissions. Snapcraft explains how to do so.

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