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:
It's still a good idea to add one if you want other people to use the software. With a licence you have the right to the minimum of (that licence | public domain), without one you have to risk it may be fully proprietary. We still don't have a good international agreement on the resulting LLM code rights.
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.
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.)
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 "—".
Using systemd could limit it's usefulness. Admittedly, most major distros have gone the systemd route but many don't. I personally use Devuan with KDE, and System Monitor doesn't work properly because of a dependency on systemd
Yes I know that I'm just an old man yelling at clouds
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.
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.
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.
For example, no way to see the memory use aggregated by process tree. I wanted this so badly (“how much RAM did VS Code eat again?”) that I vibecoded a free replacement for the Memory tab: https://macvitals.app
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.
"Native menu bar with File, Options, View, Process, Find, Window, and Help commands."
LLM-generated feature lists are so annoying. Obviously a macOS app is going to have menu bar entries. We don't need it to regurgitate every feature the prompt-monkey originally requested.
This is awesome, but also funny design-wise: the icon toolbar, misaligned table headers, inexplicably inconsistent spacing, horrible color choices, make this quintessentially Microsoft.
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 iStat Menus, but don't use it, because it destabilizes the Mac. With iStat Menus installed, I get occasional random crashes.
This has been the case for many years. It's likely that it only happens with the particular setup I use, as it's obviously a popular app with geeks, but it's prevented me from using it. I have purchased it, a couple of times, though, and have never asked for a refund. I really want it to work, and like Charlie Brown and Lucy, I'll keep trying.
For me, iStat Menus is what provides the visibility into what macOS is doing at any point in time, including capacity and traffic. That’s battery, GPU, CPU, memory, Disk, Network, sensors, etc….
For enhanced automated management of the CPU, what program gets assigned to what type of CPU core, when a program might be slowed down or stopped, etc…. that’s where App Tamer comes in.
IMO, you need both monitoring and management.
App Tamer can do only so much in terms of monitoring what’s going on, and the control it gives you is limited to things that relate to CPU cores. It can’t apply the same kinds of controls to programs that are using too much memory, or causing too much disk utilization, or using too much network, etc….
But App Tamer can do a pretty good job of managing how your CPU cores get used by the programs on your system.
a port of a tool, from a huge suite of amazing windows debug tools developed by mark russinovich, which were so good and reflected such a deep understanding of windows at the time that they brought him on board, now he's a CTO or something?
I always thought of it more as GOOD task manager, it gives you a level of detail and control that task manager simply doesn't
[0] https://objective-see.org/products/taskexplorer.html
https://www.tmog.org
He was the first person I saw use Opus to build a functional application. (The author has a moderately popular YouTube channel).
v2.0.2 released in 2019 [0]
But if you're just talking about the landing page, personally, I like the mid-Web 2.0 era aesthetic.
[0] https://github.com/objective-see/TaskExplorer/commit/50a797d...
https://youtu.be/U-_Y9PX_ESI
This repo is missing a LICENSE file #1
Open
Description @microsoft-github-policy-service bot opened on Jul 9
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'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.)
Check screenshot here - https://postimg.cc/gallery/CMczmdh/ceda7197
Yes I know that I'm just an old man yelling at clouds
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.
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.
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.
For example, no way to see the memory use aggregated by process tree. I wanted this so badly (“how much RAM did VS Code eat again?”) that I vibecoded a free replacement for the Memory tab: https://macvitals.app
dtrace[0] can provide this type of information and is shipped with macOS. It is a well documented[1] tool.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DTrace
1 - https://www.brendangregg.com/dtrace.html
https://evemon.technex.us/
https://github.com/hparadiz/evemon
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.
This is what the contemporary music player was from Microsoft, for context: https://betawiki.net/wiki/Windows_Media_Player_9_Series#/med...
This industrial design trend then fed back into the era's software.
LLM-generated feature lists are so annoying. Obviously a macOS app is going to have menu bar entries. We don't need it to regurgitate every feature the prompt-monkey originally requested.
The more important question is: Does it work well yet?
no, definitely not
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.
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.
This has been the case for many years. It's likely that it only happens with the particular setup I use, as it's obviously a popular app with geeks, but it's prevented me from using it. I have purchased it, a couple of times, though, and have never asked for a refund. I really want it to work, and like Charlie Brown and Lucy, I'll keep trying.
For enhanced automated management of the CPU, what program gets assigned to what type of CPU core, when a program might be slowed down or stopped, etc…. that’s where App Tamer comes in.
IMO, you need both monitoring and management.
App Tamer can do only so much in terms of monitoring what’s going on, and the control it gives you is limited to things that relate to CPU cores. It can’t apply the same kinds of controls to programs that are using too much memory, or causing too much disk utilization, or using too much network, etc….
But App Tamer can do a pretty good job of managing how your CPU cores get used by the programs on your system.
I use RunCat for this! Or I guess "RunCat Classic" since they have some new version I haven't bothered to check out.
I always thought of it more as GOOD task manager, it gives you a level of detail and control that task manager simply doesn't
Those and Hyena.