Yet another Hacker News

132 points ingve 1 day ago 45 comments

rekabis 21 hours ago | parent

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.

WhereIsTheTruth 6 hours ago | parent

This is the first time i witness a ugly mac app

dinkblam 6 hours ago | parent

how was it even possible to get such an ugly toolbar with Swift?

Cockbrand 6 hours ago | parent

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.

Scharkenberg 5 hours ago | parent

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?

llimllib 5 hours ago | parent

> Does it work well yet?

no, definitely not

java-man 6 hours ago | parent

Probably phones the mothership every minute and continuously requests an update. /s

overallduka 6 hours ago | parent

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

panzagl 5 hours ago | parent

If you ever used the abomination that was iTunes for Windows, you would say this is retaliation that is long overdue.

mldbk 2 hours ago | parent

ball knows ball :D

internet2000 1 hour ago | parent

When new, iTunes for Windows really was a glass of ice water in hell.

This is what the contemporary music player was from Microsoft, for context: https://betawiki.net/wiki/Windows_Media_Player_9_Series#/med...

diegolas 4 hours ago | parent

brah come on, Mac OS has that liquid glass crap, get real

santoshalper 4 hours ago | parent

Not glassy enough for ya?

etchalon 6 hours ago | parent

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

vondur 6 hours ago | parent

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.

zamadatix 5 hours ago | parent

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.

flowrange 4 hours ago | parent

Well, if you look at the commit history, the first ones are authored by Mark Russinovich himself.

kburman 6 hours ago | parent

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

donutdonot 4 hours ago | parent

I'd love to have a processexp for Linux! There's just nothing quite like it out there :-/

jherskovic 6 hours ago | parent

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?

gwbas1c 4 hours ago | parent

> 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.)

NSUserDefaults 1 hour ago | parent

I don't see how that is an excuse. A good port can still conform to platform specifics and style. It's OK if it doesn't, but it could.

Topfi 5 hours ago | parent

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.

jollyllama 5 hours ago | parent

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

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

tonymet 5 hours ago | parent

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.

mannycalavera42 5 hours ago | parent

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

kristiandupont 5 hours ago | parent

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.

hmokiguess 4 hours ago | parent

I love the menubar UI idea!

bradknowles 4 hours ago | parent

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.

LoganDark 56 minutes ago | parent

> I made this mostly because I wanted something to signal to me that the CPU is running wild.

I use RunCat for this! Or I guess "RunCat Classic" since they have some new version I haven't bothered to check out.

hparadiz 5 hours ago | parent

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

mzs 5 hours ago | parent

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

RunSet 1 hour ago | parent

Since Copilot is listed as one of the contributors it is doubtful whether any human has the right to license the code.

teh_klev 4 hours ago | parent

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:

https://youtu.be/U-_Y9PX_ESI

NegativeLatency 4 hours ago | parent

mac-assed it aint

worldsavior 4 hours ago | parent

A program developed by Microsoft... Yeah, I'm not gonna use it. Probably bad like task manager.

throwaway85825 3 hours ago | parent

The sysinternals suite is actually great and far higher quality than the rest of windows.

donkeylazy456 1 hour ago | parent

i bet you've never used sysinternals tools.

wetpaste 41 minutes ago | parent

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

internet2000 3 hours ago | parent

This is almost as bad as that Notepad++ vibecoded clone for Mac OS that got posted here a few months ago.

Kuyawa 1 hour ago | parent

  1. Take the source
  2. Tell AI to make a beautiful UI
  3. ???
  4. Profit!!1!

hk1337 1 hour ago | parent

/Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor?

tomaskafka 1 hour ago | parent

… is pretty terrible.

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