Process Explorer for macOS
github.comHow's it compare to Objective See's TaskExplorer? [0]
https://github.com/microsoft/Procexp-Mac/issues/1
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There's an episode of "Scott and Mark Learn" where Mark Russinovich (the creator of the original Process Explorer and other SysInternals tools) talks about how he created Process Explorer for MacOS with Scott Hanselman:
I've been working on something similar for Linux, in Rust with egui. It reads from /proc, cgroups, systemd over D-Bus and the netlink proc connector, so it also catches processes that start and exit between refreshes. It runs without root, and anything it can't read just shows "—".
Check screenshot here - https://postimg.cc/gallery/CMczmdh/ceda7197
I'd love to have a processexp for Linux! There's just nothing quite like it out there :-/
Installed it. Pretty straight port UI-wise, it seems like it would be very useful. It doesn’t look ‘Mac’ at all, but for developer tooling that gets a pass from me.
I couldn’t see details for some processes, which was reasonable since I wasn’t running as root. I installed the privileged helper that came with the process… and now the process tree is empty.
Maybe it needs a little more time in the oven?
> It doesn’t look ‘Mac’ at all
It's a port from the Windows version, which is exceptionally popular. On Windows, I haven't opened up Task Manager in years. (And I plan to install this the next time I use my Mac.)
This feels like a decent place to plug one of my vibe-coded side projects Mac Monitor: https://kristiandupont.github.io/mac-monitor/
I made this mostly because I wanted something to signal to me that the CPU is running wild. With no fan, I often discover this a bit late, so I wanted just a very subtle indicator in the menu bar. I also added a UI in the browser which shows you some details, though nothing near the level of Process Explorer.
I use iStat Menus for this. An excellent series of tools that lets you monitor just about everything that can be monitored on your Mac.
App Tamer will help you keep unruly apps under control, forcing them to run on efficiency cores instead of performance cores, slowing them down if they eat up more than X% of your CPU, stopping them entirely if they are in the background, and so much more.
The combo of iStat Menus and App Tamer is what makes it tolerable for me to have a MacBook Air as the primary laptop I use these days.
I love the menubar UI idea!
This looks like a port of the process explorer from the Sysinternals suite of tools that people like under windows. I think I also saw something similar to this from Dave Plummer ex Microsoft Dev. at tmog.org.
Seems like a safe bet that's what it is since "Sysinternals Process Explorer for Mac" is the opening title of the README :D.
Certain things like Sysinternals tools outside of their native platforms is somethnig I hope to see more of. E.g. I had a SumatraPDF and 7z GUI clone on Linux for a while just because I liked it more than the Linux PDF readers (now I have a home grown app which handles more formats). It looks like this one could use a bit more time in the oven though.
Well, if you look at the commit history, the first ones are authored by Mark Russinovich himself.
Might actually start using that, had a few processes on macOS 27 get into infinite loops and causing massive load, especially Safari PIDs. Being able to kill full trees, see children and look at the resources taken, might be useful. Shame that Activity Monitor is so bare in features and even takes a surprising amount of time to load.
On a related note, macOS 27 is an extremely buggy, unpredictable mess and you should feel annoyed when using it. Amazing how they can have such great hardware, ham strung by poor software QA and doubly so since this has been an issue on every Mac I have ever used going back to 2009. macOS occasionally gets a bug squashing pass, but just as fast as we get a Snow Leopard, an unstable Lion follows. Also, hotspot and WiFi generally are still utterly unreliable.
- sort by CPU seems not working - clicking on the Processes column is not switching between tree view and flatview
Been working on this for Linux for the past 10 months. Inspired by procexp but better. I even have it working remotely over an SSH socket.
Microsoft not happy in being ugly itself, now exports ugliness to Mac OS.
If you ever used the abomination that was iTunes for Windows, you would say this is retaliation that is long overdue.
Not glassy enough for ya?
brah come on, Mac OS has that liquid glass crap, get real
This is almost as bad as that Notepad++ vibecoded clone for Mac OS that got posted here a few months ago.
A program developed by Microsoft... Yeah, I'm not gonna use it. Probably bad like task manager.
The sysinternals suite is actually great and far higher quality than the rest of windows.
This is the first time i witness a ugly mac app
how was it even possible to get such an ugly toolbar with Swift?
It's obviously a straight port without much UI/UX optimization at the moment. I'm still fascinated that the port was possible at all.
The more important question is: Does it work well yet?
> Does it work well yet?
no, definitely not
I have to admit that I was intrigued at first... until I saw the UI. Too bad, but maybe they'll find more Mac-like icons at some point.
mac-assed it aint
Man, Microsoft just has no idea how to make decent UIs, huh
Process Explorer offers 1000x the observability , including sockets, file handles, libs, syscalls , threads, cpu state -- nearly every resource in use. It's a tremendous tool .
Don't overlook it just because of your backwards bias against the vendor. It wasn't originally developed by MS anyway -- Sysinternals were consultants that got acquired by MS.
Something you should aspire to.
This looks to be still in deep alpha.
It initially listed a lot of processes, but failed to display anything in the three main columns (CPU, footprint, memory), and nothing at all in the details at the bottom.
Then, when the privileged helper was installed and approved through Login Items, nothing came up ever again. All panels of the window are now blank, even after a full restart of the app.
Edit: I did not build from source, I used the downloabable DMG from the release assets.
Probably phones the mothership every minute and continuously requests an update. /s