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I wrote Task Manager and I just remembered something
- aeyes 6y agoIs it good or bad that I remember most of these features from my days on Windows 95? We have come a long way, I hardly ever have to open Task Manager nowadays.
- thrower123 6y agoI've got it open 24/7. There's enough misbehaving stuff that I have to use day-to-day that spikes off the CPU or runaway leaking memory on a regular basis... I miss the Vista/7 desktop widgets that you used to be able to use to keep an eye on this stuff without having TaskManager open.
- jkingsman 6y agoI use https://github.com/ArcadeRenegade/SidebarDiagnostics https://github.com/ArcadeRenegade/SidebarDiagnostics and love it.
- thrower123 6y agoThat is lovely, thanks.
- cheschire 6y agoYou must not have to put up with corporate cyber security professionals using tanium and HIPS to hump your hard drive for hours like a monkey on a football. I use TM multiple times a day.
- aeyes 6y agoI left the corporate world right around the time when they started to take away my admin privileges to install spyware on my machine. Good times.
- traskjd 6y agoI thought the same but recently used Windows 95 and task manager was just a list of running apps you could switch to. Resource meter was to track resource usage. Suspect we suffer the same brain fade and the task manager we remember was either windows 98 or XP type timeframes.
- bobbydreamer 6y agoNice. I open task manager everyday. I wish this dude has written VSCode
- vezycash 6y agoI wish he'd been in charge of Metro, UWP, Univeral apps and all of its reincarnations. They'd have been fast, lean, worked better with keyboard (even keyboard only). And wouldn't have so much whitespace. Wonder if he'd have made Explorer better.
- pgrote 6y agoThe author asks for an upvote for more inside trivia. Excellent first hand source. Mod responds, "Though this could be construed as a PSA, and thus in violation of Rule 8, it's got a lot of valuable info that even I have never seen before. Therefore, I'm going to leave it. /u/daveplreddit , please message the mod team or myself before making any more such posts, and we can discuss how to best move forward." Solid moderation to offer a way to keep contributing. Kudos.
- mellosouls 6y agoMy thoughts as well. Awesome gate-keeping effort, give that mod a badge.
- 0-_-0 6y agoI was concerned that they would even consider removing it from a tech support subreddit.
- mellosouls 6y agobtw just noticed "...that even I have never seen before..". The implication of his incredible knowledge makes his allowing the post by the author of Task Manager even more gracious! What a guy!
- deadbunny 6y agoOf course they've seen everything, don't you know Tech Support are basically computer geniuses?
- EvanAnderson 6y agoMore stuff like this needs to be recorded. It saddens me to think how much of this kind of stuff is already lost from earlier times in computing. A lot of interesting stuff like this is captured from the history of the Mac[1] and from Atari[2], but the "folklore" from so many other companies and products is being lost. Who are others who are doing this kind of work? [1] https://www.folklore.org/ https://www.folklore.org/ [2] https://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/ https://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/
- mwcampbell 6y agoThe Old New Thing blog [1] has a fair amount of Microsoft folklore. [1]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/
- omnibrain 6y agoAnd there was even more folklore in the comments but Microsoft killed them when migrating the blog content to a new platform.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- hoseja 6y agoI find the smugness of frequent "Airtight hatchway" posts somewhat annoying in the light of the numerous Windows security vulnerabilities though.
- WorldMaker 6y agoThe point of those posts is how frequently people think they've got a security vulnerability report that isn't one which makes it harder to spot actual Windows security vulnerabilities signal in the giant noise of feedback sent to Windows and Windows adjacent teams. Many of those posts directly mention that someone on Windows took too much time (assuming "some time" is too much time), researching enough information to assure some paying support customer that the issue they found was not a security vulnerability. I can't fault you for reading them as smug, and some of them objectively are, but the intended messaging is not making light of how many Windows security vulnerabilities happen, but of how much time is spent going in circles around non-vulnerabilities when teams could be better spent dealing with real ones.
- twic 6y ago> I also wrote Space Cadet pinball Talk about burying the lede!
- mwcampbell 6y agoNow I'd like to know why Task Manager got rewritten in Windows 8. I liked the old one better; it was lighter and faster than the current one. Disclosure: I work at Microsoft, on the Windows accessibility team. But I didn't join until a couple years after Windows 10's initial release.
- deadso 6y agoWhy do you think it got rewritten? Obviously the UI has changed, but the reddit post indicating that it can run without shell32.dll makes me think it was rewritten with a nicely decoupled UI and that is what got updated in later iterations. If you work at MS, it would be cool to find the last person to push a change to that code base and ask them. Or maybe we can reply to the reddit post.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y agoI'm tempted to reply it's because MS are spiteful tossers but actually (despite that being true) there's a bigger problem. MS used to be pretty good at interfaces - true, they really did - but on & after win8 they just forgot that UIs are not there to look 'cool' and 'awesome' but to simply to help users get shit done.
- zozbot234 6y agoIt's weird because Win8 looks like quite the opposite of "cool", at least in my view. And their interface is actually somewhat helpful on touch-based devices, but other OS's do a way better job of having a unified interface for 'touch' and 'keyboard+mouse' input.
- solarkraft 6y ago> but other OS's do a way better job of having a unified interface for 'touch' and 'keyboard+mouse' input. What are you thinking of? IOS? Android? GNOME? KDE? OSX? Windows isn't perfect at this stuff, but it's honestly the best experience I've had with a 2 in 1 (Tablet with extra keyboard + touchpad). GNOME is close, but the UI arrangement is stupid (ok, it's worse on Windows, but I digress), pen right click doesn't work and the on screen keyboard is like from another universe (it also doesn't seem to be made for people with mice, but I digress again ...). On Windows I can set the keyboard to mini-mode (floats around in a small window) and slide on it with a pen, getting about the same input speed as when typing. It's quite amazing. It's just a shame that there's Windows around it.
- jacinabox 6y agoLet me guess task manager could have managed the tasks better, i would have let it slide but if you call your program "task manager" in for a penny in for a pound.
- AareyBaba 6y agoI curse the MS developer/s who wrote the peep show listboxes: those non-resizable scrolling list boxes that display long lists in a peep hole that is just a few items long so you have to scroll endlessly to find what you need. This UI element has remained in the OS since I had hair on my head.
- pavlov 6y agoThe OP indirectly explains why those listboxes were non-resizable: “TM is one of the apps I'm most proud of because it is probably the first app to ever be fully resizable in all dimensions without any flicker.” Win32 didn’t have an automatic layout engine. Resizing meant drawing your content while new mouse events were firing rapidly. It was hard enough to do flicker-free that Microsoft preferred fixed dialogs where possible. (To be fair, it’s not like resizing is a solved problem even in 2020. For example on macOS, brand new apps ported from iOS using the Catalyst runtime seem to have absolutely terrible resize performance.)
- throwaway_pdp09 6y agoTask manager (in my win2K8R2) is bloody great. It does what it's supposed to do, does it well in little space, is highly reliable, has plenty of good options usefully exposed, is sensitive to the user (if you right-click on a process in the process view, the updates that rearrange the view freeze so things don't change underneath you) and it runs permanently for me. The author should get a medal.
- voltagex_ 6y ago"- There should be nothing that TaskMgr can't kill - it will even escalate privilege and (if you have it) enable debug privilege to attach to and kill apps that way if needed. If TM can't kill it, you've got a kernel problem." I've seen stuff that taskmgr can't kill - I haven't ever seen it use any debugging privileges that I know of.
- muststopmyths 6y agolike he said, kernel problem. Most likely a driver holding on to a handle opened by a process by not cancelling I/O properly. to my recollection the most common case, but could be similar other reasons.
- asveikau 6y agoI think it also used to be able to kill msmpeng.exe but it now fails with access denied. I assumed it was intentional because they don't want to kill antivirus. But it is a CPU hog, often at critical times, so I used to find myself killing it a lot in past releases.
- KiwiJohnno 6y agoIn windows processes have an access control list, just like file permissions. MsMpEng.exe (and other sometimes other critical system processes and antivirus scanners etc) can't be killed because only system has permission, not administrators. Process Explorer allows you to view and modify a process access control list (if you have permission). If you use psexec to run process explorer as system, then you can get into the access control list of these processes and add permission for administrator (or just kill them from there...)
- asveikau 6y agoI am ex msft. I have written windows code in kernel mode. I know that there are acls. I know about psexec too. I was not talking about any of that, but Task Manager as this thread was about. Personally if I were killing with psexec I would try invoking taskkill.exe.
- unfoldHorror 6y agoGee, remember when Windows wasn't an abomination of counterproductive spyware?
- grawprog 6y agoWow that's super cool. It's really awesome reading stories like this. I've been using windows since 3.1 and still do occasionally when i have to. I didn't know most of those things about the taskmanager. A lot of those are pretty ingenious. On the other hand, some of those make me think, wow that seems like some weird quirky shit to have to work around.
- ww520 6y agoThat's one scenario where Task Manager can't kill a process. When a full screen game hangs, the graphic mode stuck as well. No amount of Ctr-Shift-Esc or Ctr-Alt-Del will bring Task Manager on to kill the process.
- randkyp 6y agoSwitching to another virtual desktop (Win+Tab) can help if the graphics driver is still working normally. If the driver crashed, you have to wait for TDR to kick in and restart the driver (usually ~5s). That is, if it's able to recover.
- nichch 6y agoWhen Task Manager is the active window you can control it with the arrow keys and view it with alt+tab. Typically the game has “Not Responding” next to it so it’s easy to select and kill using the delete key.
- sytringy05 6y agoI've always known about CTL-SHIFT-ESC as a muscle memory bring windows back command, but never really knew where it came from (or why I even knew about it for that matter). Interesting to hear it from the original dev!
- forgingahead 6y agoGreat piece of history, glad it is being recorded somewhere. But why the posturing powertrip from the mod in the comments? "This is valuable info, even I (hurhur) didn't know it, so I'll leave it this time. However, it is irrelevant here, so I am within my rights to delete it."
- qubex 6y agoInteresting factoid: David Bradley implemented the CTRL-ALT-DEL “three-finger salute” to aid in debugging the original IBM PC way back in 1980 so that he and the development team could soft-reset the machine without needing to endure the slow POST procedure every time. Apparenly he first considered CTRL-ALT-ESC but rejected the idea because it would be too easy to accidentally press all three of those keys if somebody/something mashed the left-hand side of the keyboard, so he replaced ESC with somethin on the far right (DEL). His criteria were keys that that wouldn’t cause a character to print on the screen. Seems like the implementer of Task Manager picked up wjere he left off and chose CTRL-ALT-ESC anyway. Whether it’s some kind of homage, a coincidence, similar thinking constrained by the three finger salute having already been taken, or something else, is anybody’s guess. I’d really like to know how he came up with that key combination (and whether he considered that it could be accidentally triggered more easily than CTRL-ALT-DEL though by this time BIOS calls could be intercepted thanks to 386 Enhanced Mode and therefore you wouldn’t simply instantly reboot your machine).
- feikname 6y agoTask Manager uses CTRL-SHIFT-ESC to open, not CTRL-ALT-ESC. You can also reset it to defaults by pressing CTRL-ALT-SHIFT beforing clicking on its taskbar icon.
- qubex 6y agoYou’re right, my bad, it even says so right there in the article!
- layer8 6y agoAs the sibling notes, it is Ctrl+Shift+Esc, which was probably chosen as a variant of the Ctrl+Esc that opens the Start menu.
- screenbeard 6y agoThis makes me wonder if there's anything that can be made to behave this way on Linux? I had an issue with Gnome freezing on me 100% last night with seemingly no recourse than a hard reboot over and over until a full rebuild. Something deeply embedded like Task Manager would have been great to try and resolve the issue. Switching virtual consoles was broken too and as far as I know there's no way to cut through a problem like this.
- dcminter 6y agoNot really similar, but in some circumstances the Sys Rq commands may help: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key
- huhtenberg 6y agoMaking a window to redraw gracefully when resizing it by its left or top edge is one true nightmare. Always has been, still very much is.
- rustybolt 6y agoHe seems to put in a lot of effort in that little program! Well done. > There should be nothing that TaskMgr can't kill - it will even escalate privilege and (if you have it) enable debug privilege to attach to and kill apps that way if needed. If TM can't kill it, you've got a kernel problem. I've run into so many programs I couldn't kill with the task manager that I doubt if this is still true. Just today my laptop was idle and overheating because two different antivirus programs and cortana were each hogging 33% of my CPU... I couldn't kill any of those processes.
- prerok 6y agoI think it's still not advisable to run two antivirus programs. They will keep competing for the same resources at the same time. I would suggest using just the "better" one. Also, a lot of what AV software does goes through kernel. That's the only way to ensure that its work is not preempted and that it can maintain security of the system.
- matheusmoreira 6y ago> Task Manager will load in reduced mode if resources are short, like only loading the Processes page if that's what's needed to get going. It's one of the very few apps that won't just "fail and bail" when things go wrong. Nice example of how to degrade gracefully instead of simply crashing the process. These days most programs seem to assume memory allocation never fails. Some GNU libraries kill the process in those cases!
- throwaway894345 6y agoIn most cases it doesn’t make economic sense to implement graceful failure. OOMs are rare (unless you are a Java programmer).
- sebazzz 6y ago> I also wrote Space Cadet pinball, zip folders, product activation, and some other stuff. I was in MS-DOS before that but I doubt anyone is still supporting MS-DOS! Space Cadet pinball was not written by Microsoft, according to Raymond Chen. [0] [0]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20181221-00/?p=100535 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20181221-00/?p=10...
- pubutil 6y agoI think someone in the comments of that thread said Maxis was the original publisher, and looking it up I do see Cinematronics listed as developers. However, the taskman OP didn’t necessarily say that he wrote Space Cadet pinball, he said he “wrote/ported Space Cadet pinball, zip folders, . . .” My money is on him porting SC pinball, not writing it
- bmn__ 6y agoArticle was last changed 16 hours ago. For me, it reads "I also wrote/ported Space Cadet pinball […]". I am replying 14 minutes after you. Please explain.