Process Explorer for macOS

How's it compare to Objective See's TaskExplorer? [0]

[0] https://objective-see.org/products/taskexplorer.html

https://github.com/microsoft/Procexp-Mac/issues/1

This repo is missing a LICENSE file #1

Open

Description @microsoft-github-policy-service bot opened on Jul 9

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.

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?

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

- sort by CPU seems not working - clicking on the Processes column is not switching between tree view and flatview

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.

Microsoft not happy in being ugly itself, now exports ugliness to Mac OS.

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.

https://evemon.technex.us/

https://github.com/hparadiz/evemon

Man, Microsoft just has no idea how to make decent UIs, huh

This is the first time i witness a ugly mac app

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