airtop
Live 802.11 Wi-Fi RF dashboard in the terminal using eBPF (htop for the airwaves)
TLDR
SYNOPSIS
airtop [options]
DESCRIPTION
airtop turns the Wi-Fi traffic your Linux kernel is already seeing into a beautiful, real-time terminal dashboard. It shows:- A frequency spectrum of nearby access points with signal strength- Per-station RSSI traces over time (braille graphs)- A live heatmap of frame types (beacons, data, deauth, etc.)- RSSI histogram and a rolling list of discovered networksIt does not require monitor mode or raw sockets. It attaches eBPF programs to the normal `cfg80211`/`mac80211` stack, so your interface stays associated and you keep your connection.This makes airtop extremely practical for everyday debugging: "why is my video call dropping?", "which channel should I use for the demo?", "is someone sending deauth frames?"
PARAMETERS
--anonymize
Replace real SSIDs and MAC addresses with stable pseudonyms (network-01, station-02, ...)The dashboard is fully interactive: resize the terminal and the layout reflows. Minimum recommended size is 80×24.
CAVEATS
- Only sees traffic on the channel your interface is currently on (plus brief glimpses during background scans).- Counts frames, not airtime or bytes.- Requires a reasonably modern Linux kernel with BTF enabled (most current distros).
