Sysinternal process explorer is the ultimate taskmgr for Windows, for example you can see the threads for each process, and even their call stacks! When a file can’t be deleted because it’s open in a process but you can’t find which one, you can even search into memory for all processes and find the culprit in 3 seconds. Or see what files / reg keys a process has currently open and even force-close them… give it a try and you’ll never come back.
>Sysinternal process explorer is the ultimate taskmgr for Windows
The whole Sysinternals Process Utilities[1] is a goldmine worth bookmarking for any windows power user, and the quality of the tools is great.
The only thing I don't understand is why they aren't shipped by default with every windows installation. They're so useful and no bloat, it boggles my mind why they're not there by default.
> The only thing I don't understand is why they aren't shipped by default with every windows installation
At a guess it would mean they would have to support the suite at that version for the lifespan of the OS. Having it separate allows them to update independently and not get tied down 10 years down the line with still having to support and old code base.
This is one of the biggest reasons why pwsh (PowerShell 6+) still hasn't been included in box. There is no .NET version that is supported for the time that is required by Windows and thus cannot be included in box.
Yes, a lot of great tools, 2nd on my list is process monitor. It lets you know what sys calls were performed by any process, same as ptrace I believe. Super useful to debug a 3rd party app, for instance one that doesn't even start, looking for a file or reg key at different places, failing and exiting early. It allows one to fix it even if there are no errors or logs at all.
While procexp is great I personally prefer Process Hacker. One of the killer features for me is the more in depth handle lists as well as showing specific information for handle types and their security descriptors which I find pretty invaluable. Don't get me wrong both tools are great just wanting to share another one :)
I have to jump around quite a bit. Largely ML workloads where I default to Windows for training / developing around, and deploying out to Linux. Mac is an option, but doesn’t make since to do those tasks there.
What op said is true for me, I just pop open task manager and I get all the insight I need. No issues there. I don’t ever need to run htop locally, but is key factor in deployments where there are many more cores, accelerator config, etc
I use Mac for some UI projects or systems dev.
I’m usually in a bad mood when I have to open activity monitor.
For some insane reason though, Apples Activity Monitor can’t sort processes by the current amount of disk activity, only some nebulous ‘energy usage’ value or lifetime disk activity.
I like to leave htop, lnav and s-tui on one of my i3 wokspaces - works well for me. I do remember appreciating the task manager back in my windows days in the 90s though.
Is ksysguard not similar to task manager? The only advantage task manager has over it is that it can show the rw speed for externally plugged in devices like that, whereas ksysgaurd you have to add it manually?
There was a great little tool that I think used to be in Ubuntu, but possibly another distro, where you could press a keyboard combo, and it would turn the cursor into a little crosshairs, and then if would kill the app running whatever window you clicked on. I don't remember what it was called, anyone know?
It was definitely xkill, I remember using it a lot during the early Ubuntu releases. I think the shortcut was ctrl-alt-esc, but its so long ago it was removed I no longer know for sure.
I think it's a matter of getting used to. The task manager drives me mad. I never feel like I'm full control or know what's going on. Whereas with kill, ps, top and friends I feel like I can diagnose things a lot better. The task manager doesn't even seem to have a search bar, whereas I can just use "grep" in linux. Just right now I was trying to see if indeed it didn't have a search bar and task manager crashed when I tried to exit it. I'm more used to have several small tools I can compose and do what I need instead of having a single app where I have to hope the developers thought about the specific thing I need it to do.
I also used to be linux nerd but as I grow old I find such thing uninteresting. I wish for simple interface where I can kill process, view cpu use etc. In htop its like 3-4 steps to send kill signal which I don't like. And task manager is easy to access to like right click on task bar and click on task manager or Ctrl + Alt + Del.
Also searching is generally not hard in task manager, you can just type process name and it should select it. Yes, it can be tricky sometime but most of time I use it to see process which consumes high cpu or internet bandwidth.
I do agree with GP, windows task manager is simple. If we need advance feature we can use process hacker etc.
I do agree with you too. So its just a matter of taste. But most user aren't nerd and they want something simple like task manager. My mom would simply refuse to use linux because she simply doesn't like cli interface.
I expected to like Powershell, but I came away even less happy in Powershell than trying to program bash. It felt so much as though it had been built by aliens who'd watched a video of Unix shell programming and integrated their own strange preferences, while also stirring in things from Windows.
At the end of a week's work, I had a script which worked on my system, but blew up on the production systems it was intended for, and although we eventually worked around the stupid problem I want nothing further to do with that work. I co-own the far larger C# project it's associated with despite never having written C# a year ago, C# feels like a nice but slightly boring modern language, I probably wouldn't choose to write it for pleasure, but I don't hate getting paid to do so. However I seriously regret assuming that it was worth writing the "obviously just a script" part in Powershell rather than wrapping it all in C# and having the "script" just run that.
So, maybe it "doesn't totally suck" but it sure does suck pretty badly.
