9 ms·
Today I learned you can pause the Windows Task Manager moving apps around
- isaacfrond 3y agoI've used that app for 20+ years. And cursed the moving around apps all that time. Turns out there is a single keyboard click trick to avoid it (press CTRL, that is). I feel a bit stupid now.
- mynegation 3y agoI haven’t used windows in a while, I believe I just sorted by the name column to put everything in a fixed place.
- Novosell 3y agoYeah, I did precisely the same thing. I'm floored that people have suffered from this "issue" to be honest.
- sphars 3y agoIf you're looking for a specific program/app, then this is the way. But what the article is talking about is when sorting by the CPU column (for a high usage app), as everything jumps around quite a bit.
- mynegation 3y agoYes. I would select the like using my fast clicking skills, sort, and then find the selection. Ctrl trick is much nicer had it worked in all Windows versions and had I known about it.
- mixmastamyk 3y agoSorting by mem usage will show the big apps which 99% of the time will also be the ones using cpu time. Still, this trick is neat.
- akira2501 3y agoThe real problem is "instantaneous CPU usage" is pretty useless to users. It'd be like trying to judge the speed of my car solely by gear ratio and engine RPM. Perhaps some gauge to show me the actual derivative value would be smarter.
- TheSpiceIsLife 3y agoIf you know the gear ratio (ok, and diff ratio, and wheel circumference) and engine RPM, you can derive the speed with high confidence. Perhaps what you meant was solely by the engine RPM.
- gnatman 3y agoIf I'm exiting the highway into a 35-mph zone, I don't want to derive my speed with high confidence from 4 other numbers, I want to see that pertinent number directly.
- akira2501 3y agoThe other point would be is that derivatives can provide low pass filtering. The "high frequency" components of "CPU usage" are not useful to me.
- toast0 3y agoMy pattern was sort by whatever usage to identify the app I want to interact with; if it's constantly at the top, easy peasy; if not, I can now sort by name, because I'm looking for a specific program.
- fortyseven 3y agoIt's not intuitive. Not your fault. No reason to have guessed that.
- kodra 3y agoWhy do you feel stupid? There is absolutely zero discoverability. But you should've probably discovered View -> Update Speed :)
- ourmandave 3y agoMaybe it will be a question on your next DevOps job interview.
- karakot 3y agoyes, a good example for a bad question.
- seanp2k2 3y ago“Do you recall __X obscure fact__” just like too much of standardized testing. Edit: another example would be something like judging someone on if they remember the option name in an API call for a specific library. Trivial to google. Whiteboard interviews for stuff like this are asinine.
- leptons 3y agoSorting by "Name" also achieves more or less the same thing.
- stevenwoo 3y agoI think I've used Windows since the beginning and I don't think it's anything to be ashamed of - there is no status update on the user interface (at least on my Windows 10 Task Manager) to indicate that pressing CTRL has any effect - it's like a precursor to all those hidden multiple finger/movement gestures on modern phones except with possibly less discoverability.
- seanp2k2 3y agoYou’re not the stupid one, their UI designers / devs are for hiding a useful feature and making the default UX suck.
- denysonique 3y agoThe equivalent in htop is Shift+Z
- thangngoc89 3y agoThanks. It's a real struggle to kill the process you really want when it keeps jumping.
- WithinReason 3y agoMaybe it's trying to escape
- pluijzer 3y agoFirst thing I did when opening the comments was searching for 'htop', I was sure somebody would teach me how to do it there. It did not disappoint. I was always annoyed by it, never occurred to me to look for a solution.
- TRiG_Ireland 3y agoThe problem with htop is that it's a normal program, so when your computer's freezing you can't start htop. The Task Manager is the one thing I miss from Windows. No matter what kind of broken state the computer was in, you could always start the Task Manager.
- actuallyalys 3y agoI don’t think it is quite as reliable as the task manager but on some (most?) Linux distributions you can use control-alt plus function keys to switch away from the graphical user interface to one of the ttys. Some issues affecting your display or window manager can be fixed that way.
- usrbinbash 3y ago> No matter what kind of broken state the computer was in, you could always start the Task Manager. The only thing that can prevent me from accessing htop, is a kernel panic. Because, even if the Desktop Environment crashes or freezes (Can't even remember the last time that happened), I can always switch to another virtual console with Ctrl+Meta+F2, login and run any program from there, including starting another DE instance. And in the equivalent of a kernel panic in windows (BSOD), the Task Manager is inaccessible as well.
- nailer 3y agoBlogspam, direct link: https://twitter.com/JenMsft/status/1691563112175165724 https://twitter.com/JenMsft/status/1691563112175165724
- ChoGGi 3y agoI always just went to the menu and changed refresh time, but this will make it easier.
- sphars 3y agoFrom the comments on the verge's article: if you hold down the F5 key, it'll increase the refresh speed. Not sure why you'd want the refresh speed higher though...
- netsharc 3y agoF5 means refresh now, on Windows 7 opening the "View" menu shows Refresh Now and the F5 shorcut key right-aligned. Geez, where are all the shortcut keys, Windows 10?
- WorldMaker 3y agoThere's also View > Update Speed > High and you don't need to hold a key. Faster refresh can help if you are debugging certain types of processes. (Though you probably want a real performance testing tool at some point if you are doing that a lot.)
- gagged_s_poster 3y ago[dead]
- rkagerer 3y agoGreat feature, regrettably obscured by a lack of discoverability. The norm used to be to show shortcut accelerators right next to their menu dropdowns. That would naturally advertise those most useful to the user, without getting in the way. Tangentially, the correct way to present nifty tips like this is NOT in a "tour of new features" wizard spammed at the user when they're opening your app to try and get something important done.
- albert_e 3y agoYep ... or just putting this info (keyboard shortcuts) in the "Help" menu which is the last item in a standard menu bar.
- jbverschoor 3y agoOr just make it an actual menu item / command, because that’s what it is..
- naikrovek 3y agothis is the correct way to expose keyboard shortcuts to users. this is how it used to be done before UX people started getting involved and following trends instead of thinking about usability.
- wongarsu 3y agoIt is. On Windows 10 it's View -> Update Speed -> Paused. On Windows 11 it's more hidden because the redesign got rid of the menu bar, but you can still find it by clicking on the gear icon in the bottom, then changing the "real time update speed" dropdown. Maybe a big "pause" button next to the "end task" button would have been better, but it's not that undiscoverable. It's certainly easier to find than the option to show additional columns in the details view, like gpu memory used, the full command line, or total CPU time.
- myself248 3y ago> the redesign got rid of the menu bar This drives me batty, and it just feels like an insult. For decades, the argument for sticking with Windows was that it was a single stable UI/UX with lots of established conventions. The same menus in the same places, the same hotkeys worked everywhere, etc. Linux couldn't claim that, was the pitch. Since human time is the expensive part, it didn't matter if the OS itself wasn't exactly performant, and we could afford to throw hardware at its ever-more-bloated footprint, because the investment in _human reflexes_ paid dividends whose value far exceeded some extra sticks of RAM or whatever. Now that hardware is virtually free and it _should_ cost nothing to continue that legacy of consistency, they've fucked it all up! Teams is completely unusable by keyboard, the new UI skin got rid of all the menu bars, lately I've found GUI elements that're _hidden until you mouse over them_, like are they kidding? I feel like I've been played for a fool. Every time I run into one of these insults, it pisses me off way more than the individual problem should, because it twists this 3-decade-old knife in my gut.
- toss1 3y agoThis is great! It would be much better if they made it more discoverable. What I miss most is the ability in earlier TaskMgr versions to select an app and Switch To that app (RtClick menu). Far more convenient way to see IF I need to kill the app or whatever other action. It'd be really cool to have that back with this newly discovered (to us) Ctrl-to-pause function.
- userbinator 3y agoI wonder how long that has been there? But View -> Update Speed -> Paused has been there since the beginning and it's much more discoverable.
- brudgers 3y agoClicking on the Name column also works.
- EmileSonneveld 3y agoI prefer to sort on the memory column. Like this the relevant apps stay on top and don’t switch that often.
- zwieback 3y agoWow, my life was a lie! I always sort by name and then scroll but will adopt this now.
- tgv 3y agoSorting, then filtering by name was my goto.
- naikrovek 3y agohow do you filter in Task Manager?
- xnyan 3y agoIt's a feature of the latest version of task manager. I don't know of any way to do it with the win10 task manager, but you can always "Get-Process | Out-GridView" which will present a GUI process info table with sorting and a filter.
- zwieback 3y agoAlso, tasklist and taskkill work for the most common use of killing zombie processes and you don't have to learn powershell
- xnyan 3y ago>you don't have to learn powershell Always surprised to hear this on HN. Powershell is such a better experience than any other option on windows. I think it's objecty nature scares people off, but it's really not much of a time commitment to proficiency and a fairly pleasant experience to use.
- naikrovek 3y agoagree. powershell is awesome and underrated.
- hospitalJail 3y agoToo late, I already switched to linux. It was death by 100 cuts, and the opaque memory management was one of the cuts. I'd say 1 drive hijacking your file system was 100 cuts. Cortana, in-menu candy crush ads/ragebait news, auto reboot, edge default opening links, more cuts.
- cam_l 3y agoYeah, I switched too, but the task manager I use now is a bit of a letdown compared to windows. It always shows the same processes, just the base os and the apps I installed and expressly start or autostart. There are no new obscurely named processes constantly popping up after every update. There are no rogue processes using 90% cpu, no programmes hanging and crashing the window manager. It's just all so predictable and.. well, boring. I almost miss the excitement of never quite knowing what I would find in the window task manager.
- wedd222 3y ago> While I have your attention, you might also like to know that you can spin the gear in Windows 11’s Notepad app. It’s like a digital fidget spinner, and part of the many delightful little additions to Windows 11. Hey Microsoft, thanks for the spinner, but how about instead you un-ruin right clicking in explorer and give me my corners back.
- buggy6257 3y agoBecause as we all know as software engineers, Windows as a whole is likely only written by a single team or maybe even single developer, and thus multiple features cannot be worked on at the same time, and thus you have to pick between these two things.
- userbinator 3y agoThere's something called budget. People are being paid to write frivolous crap, when those funds could've gone to better uses. If you're someone who pays for software, you want your money to pay for the things you want.
- johnnyworker 3y agoThat in itself is orthogonal to progress or regression. For example, while one team could put a fidget spinner in Notepad, another could ruin right-clicking in Explorer. Which obviously raises the question if another team could be spun up to incentivize the first team to distract the second team long enough for a fourth team to swoop in and fix right-clicking in Explorer.
- yomlica8 3y agoAfter that, you have a whale eat the whole let of them. But then how do you get rid of the whale?
- mrguyorama 3y agoYou ask Japan to conduct some research on it.
- kongolongo 3y agoOn Windows 11, task manager has a search function now!
- bluedragontea 3y agoTask Manager is missing "filter by name" which Sysinternals Process Explorer has.
- jaywalk 3y agoWindows 11 has it.
- dmccarty 3y agoIt's a nice little tip, although I have to question any article that claims task manager items are "randomly moving around." FWIW I always assumed anyone who really cared about this stuff was using Sysinternals's excellent Process Explorer instead.
- roelschroeven 3y agoOr Process Hacker (https://processhacker.sourceforge.io/ https://processhacker.sourceforge.io/) which IMO is even better.
- genocidicbunny 3y agoI don't think I could even describe what the current Task Manager window looks like because I've been using Process Explorer as a replacement for probably a decade now.
- Slackwise 3y ago> I have to question any article that claims task manager items are "randomly moving around." "Randomly" is colloquially used to mean "chaotically" in a lot of contexts, and the chaotic they mean is "unpredictable enough as to seem or feel random".
- lurtbancaster 3y agoI only discovered this because of an accidental keyboard malfunction ~10 years ago. I pressed Ctrl+Shift+Escape to open Task Manager. And then I was confused that the list wasn't moving around. Sorted by CPU usage and still, the list just wasn't updating. Thought I'd discovered some rare bug. So I closed task manager and then when I tried to open it up again using Ctrl+Shift+Escape, I realized the Ctrl key was already pressed. Thank you to the grime in the walls of the key housing of my Ctrl key in my uncleaned membrane keyboard. Wouldn't have discovered this feature without you.
- bentcorner 3y agoI just realized I've been triggering this accidentally for months if not years. Every so often I'd notice that Task Manager would stop updating and I always thought it was some kind of bug where the "Update period" would get set to "Paused". All this time it was because I pressed Ctrl.
- HeckFeck 3y agoA bit like how we discovered sticky keys from hammering 'Shift' while playing full screen games on Windows 98. Cost me more than a few lives...
- 2devnull 3y agoI’ve always enjoyed trying to click the moving apps, like a little video game I get to play to break up the monotony of my computing adventure.
- doctorpangloss 3y agoGive me a way "taskkill /f /t" processes from the task bar, and then I never have to visit Task Manager in the first place.
- boomboomsubban 3y agoDidn't they just add one to the right click menu? There was a story about it recently. edit link https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36151607 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36151607
- gsuuon 3y agoI really wish filtering could optionally include matching processes' children
- robotnikman 3y agoSo many times this feature would have come in handy for me, glad to find out about it!
- wruza 3y agoOr they could, you know, put a play/pause button somewhere in the ui. If discovered myself, and knowing what Windows is, I’d rather think that pressing Ctrl simply breaks the WindowProc somehow than assuming it’s its intentional function.
- lapsis_beeftech 3y agoI prefer to keep the task manager processes sorted by PID, that way the order is stable with new processes appearing at the end of the list.
- alliao 3y agobeen playing that I'm the OS game and this comment brings joy
- user070223 3y agoMy tip: download sysinternals procexp(taskmgr with more features) (or download the entire suite, possibly from the microsoft store), on the menu you have the option to permenantly replace the taskmgr
- threeboy 3y agoYou can also just sort by name.
- danjc 3y agoYa know what else jumps around - the contents of the stupid start menu. Super irritating when the wrong app starts because as you clicked, it reshuffled to render additional items that loaded async.
- elorant 3y agoIf you sort by name the UI remains stale.
- spiralx 3y agoThe guy who wrote the original Task Manager has a video about how it came to be, how it works and some of the "hidden" features such as the one in the article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ve95Nh690l0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ve95Nh690l0 He's also got a new video trying to see how the NT4 Task Manager handles 32 CPU cores lol.
- flobosg 3y agoRelated: I wrote Task Manager and I just remembered something – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23304536 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23304536
- nottorp 3y ago> Microsoft is working on a force quit option to close apps without the Task Manager in Windows 11 simply from a right-click option in the taskbar. When did they put that in os x? In 1.0?
- wombat-man 3y agoThe taskbar. I think the equivalent in macos would be force quit from the dock which I don't see. Just quit.
- david_allison 3y agoHold 'option' and "Force Quit" appears
- wombat-man 3y agoAh
- nottorp 3y agoIf the app is frozen you also get 'force quit' directly.
- omnibrain 3y agoAnd if you want to kill a specific task, you don't have to "right click->end task", you can instead just press "del".
- jmlim00 3y agoNeat, but then I need to move my right hand off of the mouse. My go to is Alt + E
- drsopp 3y agoI miss user manuals.
- almostnormal 3y agoIs it a feature of the task manager itself? Or possibly a feature of the list, which switches to multi-select mode wheb ctrl is held? If the latter is true, it might work in explorer, too, which shuffles files around when displaying network drives or directory entries change.
- eob 3y agoThere used to be a hack to get around password protected screen savers in which you’d do the following (IIRC): - Drag the password window around the screen furiously - Press Ctrl-Alt-Del as you did it I think it would just dump you straight to the desktop. I remember doing it in Circuit City as a kid to access computers.
- paradox460 3y agoYou could bypass the login on older Windows by using balloon help to open the print dialog to open the help interface to get an open file picker to launch explorer and the desktop
- drumhead 3y agoI did not know this, but now I dont have to play the whack-a-mole catch the app to kill it game anymore.
- usrbinbash 3y ago> Microsoft is working on a force quit option to close apps without the Task Manager in Windows It always amazes me how things that have been standard features in Linux Desktop environments, usually for a long time, are big news in the Windows world.
- bozhark 3y agoApples to Androids
- devnullbrain 3y agoIt's a necessary development: it's tough for Microsoft employees to get their work done when programs keep on crashing Explorer.exe and then Task Manager becomes unresponsive too. Hopefully they'll run into some friction using NTFS so we can start modifying files that are in use.
- sn_master 3y agoWait until you learn what the F7 shortcut does in the Windows Console.