This is a great post, recently I have been trying to re-learn and understand linux (specifically) ubuntu using monitoring tools.
In my opinion htop and Facebook osquery are the two best available tools for understanding how an operating systems and processes work. The osquery approach of recording all OS data in form relational tables (with PIDs as keys etc.) is very useful.
Not quite. You can access lsof and strace from inside htop. There is also a process tree view, and you can select the process you want to manipulate via arrow keys.
This reminds me that MC supports mouse interaction.
And playing around with it, i find that it is more elaborate than i first anticipated. The menus can even be operated via the scroll wheel, and it is sensitive to where the mouse is hovering.
All in all i find myself pondering if more up to date console web browser is possible. Perhaps using the framebuffer rather than X to display sites (or maybe go all out and implement it using sixel).
Same here! I picked up htop ~2011 and learned about mouse support in ~2014. :D
Also- if you're on a Mac and you use tmux I just started trying out the tmux integration with iterm2. Pros and cons but it's interesting to see first class OS windows for tmux.
https://hisham.hm/htop/
https://osquery.io/
The osquery query packs are especially useful: https://osquery.io/docs/packs/
Here is an incomplete draft about a similar post: https://github.com/AKSHAYUBHAT/TopDownGuideToLinux