I occasionally run top under vala-terminal in Debian on my OpenMoko
FreeRunner phone. The screen on this device is 2.84" diagonal. After
removing the space taken by the virtual keyboard, panel and
vala-terminal toolbar, this gives a terminal size of 51x19 which is
enough to display up to the %MEM column and 12 processes. If I increase
the font size to something that is more readable and restart top then I
get a size of 28x10 which is enough to display up to the VIRT column and
3 processes. I'd like top to gracefully degrade in the following ways:
Assign an "importance" value to each column based on some criteria, sort
the columns by "importance" and drop any columns that don't fit in the
terminal size. I'm thinking that the importance order should be
something like currently selected sort column, command, pid, user, %CPU,
%MEM, TIME+, NI, PR, VIRT, RES, SHR & S. The importance order should be
configurable so that people can customise it.
The rows at the top should become progressively more abbreviated as the
number of columns in the terminal decreases. Initially the extra
whitespace should be removed, then abbreviate phrases to single words,
then abbreviate words to less and less characters, then just display the
numbers and units, then drop units.
The rows at the top should have "importance" values and should be
dropped to make way for more processes. The drop order should be
configurable and default to something like blank line, Tasks, Swap, Mem,
Cpu(s), top.