Description
@microsoft-github-policy-service
bot
opened on Jul 9
teh_klevtoday at 8:16 PM
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 "—".
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.
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.
Topfitoday at 7:08 PM
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.
mannycalavera42today at 7:18 PM
- sort by CPU seems not working
- clicking on the Processes column is not switching between tree view and flatview
vondurtoday at 6:27 PM
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.
hparadiztoday at 7:37 PM
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.
internet2000today at 9:13 PM
This is almost as bad as that Notepad++ vibecoded clone for Mac OS that got posted here a few months ago.
worldsaviortoday at 8:51 PM
A program developed by Microsoft... Yeah, I'm not gonna use it. Probably bad like task manager.
WhereIsTheTruthtoday at 6:05 PM
This is the first time i witness a ugly mac app
NegativeLatencytoday at 8:50 PM
mac-assed it aint
etchalontoday at 6:21 PM
Man, Microsoft just has no idea how to make decent UIs, huh
tonymettoday at 7:14 PM
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.
rekabistoday at 3:35 AM
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.
java-mantoday at 6:18 PM
Probably phones the mothership every minute and continuously requests an update. /s