Yeah, I would often just grab htop because I had no idea how to read the CPU usage out of top.
For example, for me it says:
%Cpu(s):  0,4 us,  0,4 sy,  0,0 ni, 98,8 id,  0,0 wa,  0,3 hi,  0,0 si,  0,0 st
Now that I look at it, I can guess that us and sy are supposed to be user and system time. And I guess id is supposed to be idle.
I have no guess what the other numbers might be, though. And well, I would often like to see the CPU usage per core.
Now I know that I can just press 1t and get effectively the same view as in htop.
I might learn top’s filtering workflow, too. But so far, I always killed processes with ps -ef | grep <process-name> and then kill <pid>, which isn’t particularly more cumbersome, so will see…









Yeah, I especially don’t understand it here, because it’s a graphical tool. You don’t have to keep backwards compatibility.
Even if you’re worried about people depending on the format that’s being piped, you could keep only the piped format stable. We have the technology.