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Windows IT Technology

Windows 11's Task Manager is Getting a Search Box To Help You Find Misbehaving Apps (theverge.com) 98

Posted by msmash from the good-job dept.
Microsoft has started testing a new search and filtering system for the Task Manager on Windows 11. It will allow Windows users to easily search for a misbehaving app and end its process or quickly create a dump file, enable efficiency mode, and more. From a report: "This is the top feature request from our users to filter / search for processes," explains the Windows Insider team in a blog post. "You can filter either using the binary name, PID or publisher name. The filter algorithm matches the context keyword with all possible matches and displays them on the current page." You'll be able to use the alt + F keyboard shortcut to jump to the filter box in the Task Manager, and results will be filtered into single or groups of processes that you can monitor or take action on. Alongside the new search and filter functionality, Microsoft is also adding the ability to pick between light or dark themes in the Task Manager. Themes will also be applied fully throughout Task Manager, with some updates to its UI to fit more closely with Microsoft's overall Fluent work.
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Windows 11's Task Manager is Getting a Search Box To Help You Find Misbehaving Apps More

Windows 11's Task Manager is Getting a Search Box To Help You Find Misbehaving Apps

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  • Yeah Yeah (Score:2, Insightful)

    by muh_freeze_peach ( 9622152 )
    In this thread will be "Windows sucks except for xp, and 7" ad nauseum
    • nauseam*
    • a thing I don't understand: why there's no way to make a Window always in front of others, natively, in MS's Windows (any version)...

      • Because such a feature is ripe for abuse? Just a guess.

        • it never existed in Windows... (if the user can control it, is easy to avoid abuse/misuse...)

          • "if the user can control it"

            Were you there in the early days of the popular internet, during the "cascading windows of porn" browser-vs-advertiser wars?

            Give the programmers the opportunity to create unblockable artifacts, and it will be abused.

            • Why these abuses don't happen in gnome/KDE/xfce?

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by caseih ( 160668 )

              But that's not what the OP was talking about at all. They were talking about a user being able to bring up the window menu and select "keep on top." This is way different from a program being able to force itself to the top.

              While we're on the topic of Windows window managing papercuts, the inability to move a window of an unresponsive program has driven me nuts for years. Fortunately Windows now detects blocked programs and lets you move them but that took decades to happen! Glad that Mate and KDE are s

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by EvilSS ( 557649 )
        The ability to do it is in the APIs, it is just not exposed in the native Windows UI. Not sure why. There is a power toy utility from Microsoft to do it. Individual apps can do it if they write it in (task manager has this ability to keep itself always on top).

      • There used to be the ability to force any window to the foreground. Developers abused it. Now when you call SetForegroundWindow(), it has to meet a lengthy list of requirements:

        https://learn.microsoft.com/en... [microsoft.com]

        If it doesn't, the taskbar icon for the app and the window title bar will flash 3 times. That's still super annoying as a user since clicking on the app DURING the flash sequence will still cause it to continue flashing and the glow effect on the icon still sticks around even though the window/app

        • Its use is discouraged though for obvious reasons.

          The obvious reason: the user can't control it (a simple right click in the title bar is too complicated?)

          • Yes. It is too complicated for 95% of users.

            Users should just be able to 'use' their computers. They should be easy enough that no special training or cheat sheets are required. No UI I'm aware of comes close to this today.

            Allowing apps to take over the screen and requiring the user to know something obscure like "mom, just right click on the title bar, then, left click, yes, the thing on top, ok, yes, now right click on that and then left click on the, yes you can release the right button now, uh that's

            • It's the same reason that dummies still use M$ Office...
            • This kind of thing created several users that don't know what they are doing, helping malwares to spread and scams to easily work...

              • Users don't know what they're doing. And shouldn't need a comp sci degree to use a computer. It's just a tool. Its purpose is to make people more efficient at their work. If it doesn't do that it's a design failure. That includes malware and the rest. Thanks for making my point: no current OS I'm aware of is suitable for normal people and making it even harder is the wrong direction and doubly so if making it harder only gets a stupid feature like devs taking over their screen with no obvious way out.

                • The issue is: M$ treat users like they are "always" stupid (if the same is applied to cooking, for example, people burn themselves more easily...) About M$ Office, I'm not suggesting people to use nothing different from a office suite (libreoffice is far superior than M$'s, for example: MS office don't open OpenDocument natively [and opening CSV files in Excel is a PITA...)

                  • Have you ever been on or in charge of IT at a company or the go-to guy for your family and friends?

                    Users -are- stupid (your word, I disagree). Users should not require a comp sci degree to create an email to their grand kids or a flyer for their garage sale. The software is too fucking hard.

                    Here's what you said "Just right click on the title bar". Wtf? That's insane. Who came up with that shit? Makes no sense. Who is going to teach a billion or so windows users some dumb ass thing like that? To get

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by jwhyche ( 6192 )

        Yeah, as you said not natively. You can if you use a 3rd party product. The calls are native to windows, I just don't know why there is no 'sticky' button. I use a product called DisplayFusion. You can call some of the widows 'hidden' function and assign them hot keys. I have ctrl-windows-t tied to 'always on top' function.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by kmoser ( 1469707 )
        My Winamp window is configured to be "always on top". Now get off my lawn.
        • Try to do this with a file explorer window, for example (and, get of of my lawn :P)
        • Wimamp is so 90's... You are the other one that still use it?
          • I definitely loved Winamp. Honestly, who really wanted 1 million options? Winamp just played files. BAM! Nice Skins BAM2. Just put your files in directories named with the artists... then play them. Also I think there was some pretty wild fractal graphics "visualizer" too... that was just sugar, but seriously who asked for the ultra commercialization, data gathering monsters we have now? I'm using Parole, I think, whatever comes on Xfce. Seems fine actually, pretty slim and functional. It's fine imho.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        I use an ancient app called "always-on-top.exe" from Labnol which seems to work just fine. There is also an official PowerToy for Windows 10/11 now I think.

        It works on Windows 8.1 and 10, have not tried other versions.

    • In this thread will be "Windows sucks"

      Well, an OS that spams you with advertising... interrupts your work to force (huge, slow) upgrades on you... requires a "TPM" chip to even run... requires signing in to a "Microsoft account" to use... requires 3rd party antivirus software to even have a hope of overcoming the black hat tide that plagues the mass of buggy, vulnerable code that actually makes up the OS...

      These things could, just possibly, result in an evaluation of the general class "it sucks."

    • Windows NT 3.5 is the shiznit.

      • I ran a cluster of NT 3.51 back in the day in a lab-like environment.

        For the times it was pretty awesome. Didn't crash all the fucking time like the home versions and was generally just smoother and just kinda worked. No glitzy shit getting in the way, either.

        If they could make a windows today that had a similar philosophy it would likely be very popular.

    • I enjoyed visiting the Air and Space Nauseum. At first.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by antdude ( 79039 )

      2K > 7 > XP :P

  • ...prior art in Gnome's/XFCE's (and probably all others than MS's) task manager from 1995 onwards

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      1995? This was the norm in dinosaur pens in 1965.

      IBM wasn't the fastest, it was the most stable. s360 was designed for uptime not performance.

      I'm not yelling at ya kids to get off my lawn, but understand that > 90% of the "new advances" in Windows, Linux, and MacOS from a core OS perspective are actually old hat on mainframe environments. This is just one of them.

      I'm talking the underlying os - scheduler, user space, file systems, memory management, partitioning, virtualization, fault tolerance, resta

    • Unix has had this search feature since 1973. It's called grep.
      • We are talking about graphic user interfaces here ;P

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by jonadab ( 583620 )
          > We are talking about graphic user interfaces here ;P

          Eh, it's all moot. In practice, when the system is acting up the problem is usually in kernelspace. You think there must be some processes running the CPU at 1000%, but it usually turns out that the real problem is, the system is I/O bound, because the filesystem implementation in 8/10/11 is absolute trash and the virtual memory subsystem isn't great either and between the two of them they can keep you waiting for quite a while for the system to bec

  • Better idea (Score:3)

    by Big Hairy Gorilla ( 9839972 ) on Thursday November 10, 2022 @02:32PM (#63041587)
    Would it be faster to search for apps that are NOT misbehaving?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kmoser ( 1469707 )
      Easy:

      function findNotMisbehavingApps() { return []; }

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by jonadab ( 583620 )
      This is Windows 8/10/11 we're talking about. It's faster to just assume the problem is in kernelspace.

      The system is probably I/O bound, because the filesystem and virtual memory implementations are trash. You can look for wayward processes to kill off, but 99% of the time you won't find any, not because the process management tools are trash (they *are* trash but that is beside the point), but rather because there isn't usually a wayward process to find. The problem is usually in kernelspace, and the onl
  • You'll find the results somewhere below the sponsored links.

  • Stop this (Score:2, Interesting)

    by niff ( 175639 )

    Windows already has so many âoelists of appsâ.

    - the taskbar
    - the alt-tab list
    - the windowkey-tab list
    - shortcuts on the desktop
    - the start menu
    - the task manager
    - the performance monitor
    - the add/remove apps list

    Instead of adding yet another app-list, why not add this to some of the existing ones?

  • "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."

  • How about a way to identify a window (Score:5, Interesting)

    by CubicleZombie ( 2590497 ) on Thursday November 10, 2022 @03:13PM (#63041711)

    When I have 12 instances of Visual Studio open and one locks up, Task Manager gives no hint as to which is which and I have to just end-task one at a time until the offending window closes. Which is a horrible pain in the ass.

    How about a context menu on the "X" button, with one of the options being "End Task". Borrowing from another post, "Always on Top" in that menu would be nice, too.

    • Re:How about a way to identify a window (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Virtucon ( 127420 ) on Thursday November 10, 2022 @03:37PM (#63041791)

      ever tried procexp (SysInternals Process Explorer)? [microsoft.com]

      I use it when I can't nail what's going on with Task Manager.

      • Newer versions by Microsoft intentionally hide certain things from you. I still use the old version actually made by SysInternals from many years ago.

    • Task Manager gives no hint as to which is which

      It will literally write "Not Responding" in the field marked "Status" next to the process. I don't know how much more of a "hint" you need.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Because he expects the OS to tell him what he did wrong.. rather than being a real developer and figuring it out himself... Oh... there's a pipeline bug in this opcode during prefetch.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      If the app is hung then click on it a few times. Windows will notice that the event queue is filling up with user interaction and ask if you want to kill it or wait. It will also get "(not responding)" next to it in Task Manager.

      It's one of those rare occasions when the 15th click actually does do something different and more helpful than the previous 14.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by jonadab ( 583620 )
      > How about a context menu on the "X" button, with one of the options being "End Task".

      That only works for processes that actually have a window with the standard window-manager decorations. Admittedly, that's most of the ones with visible windows these days, which is an improvement over the bad old days of Windows 95, when every application developer and his nephew thought it was super cool to implement their own half-baked and entirely non-standard window decorations and widgets and everything. That'

  • already exists: it's called the Shutdown button.

    • The irony of your attempted joke is that when an app misbehaves the shutdown button won't actually shutdown your computer but rather wait for user input to tell the OS if you want to attempt to force close apps.

  • MS spends so much time gathering data off of your system, anonymously of course *cough* *cough* that it would seem they should know what is going to "misbehave." They could just then be put into a job object [microsoft.com] and then your app may still misbehave but your other apps will still not get a complete lockup. Mainframes and most timesharing systems had either built-in or 3rd party products that would keep resource hogs at bay.

    In the meantime

    Windows + R -> taskmgr

  • Why should an occasional Windows user like me upgrade to 11 from 10 ?

    Is there a killer app for Windows 11 ?

    • Re:Windows 11 ? Meh. Change my mind ! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by MachineShedFred ( 621896 ) on Thursday November 10, 2022 @04:14PM (#63041903) Journal

      Not yet, but if you play video games, the DirectStorage stuff may become important. Last I heard that was going to be Win11 only, but they may have relented and released it for Win10 as well.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by jonadab ( 583620 )
        > Not yet, but if you play video games, the DirectStorage stuff may become important.

        Depends what kind of video games you play. Most people these days play Javascript-based games that are built into websites. Other than myself, I don't personally know anyone IRL who plays any other kind of videogame, so far as I am aware. (As for me, I play stuff like NetHack and Brogue and IFComp games and Perl golf, so it's not really a major consideration in my case either.)

        • Yeah, people kept new GPUs off the shelves for two years because they were playing Perl golf.

          You might be outside the target demo of what people refer to as "gamers".

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by jonadab ( 583620 )
            > You might be outside the target demo of what people refer to as "gamers".

            Likely. But here's the thing: so is pretty much everyone I've ever met. I mean, everyone plays games of some kind, and _almost_ everyone plays games on either computers or phones. But "gamers" in the Twitch sense of the term (people who spend thousands of dollars a year on the latest-greatest hardware to run AAA 3D games the day they release), are much less common. Even among teenagers, they are in the minority.

            The other post

            • I suspect the major selling point for Windows 11 is going to be "they aren't selling computers with other versions of Windows any more."

              That has been the major selling point for every version of Windows since Windows 7.

    • no, thank god. i will stay on windows 10 as long as my 2015 devil canyon i7 runs. doesnt play games anymore as im 46now. i only miss playing civ with my brother. otherwise directx doesnt affect me or win11.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by King_TJ ( 85913 )

        I'm 51 and still game on my Windows 10 gaming laptop I bought for the purpose. I agree though, that I see no need to upgrade it to 11. Microsoft keeps prompting me about it, but they haven't convinced me why I should bother yet? So far, they keep experimenting with things like placing ads in the logoff menu -- so that's not a good sign.

        Since you mentioned playing Civ... Did you look at the remake of Age of Empires they did recently? Also promising a remake of Age of Mythology. I'd think you might enjoy thos

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by jonadab ( 583620 )
      > Why should an occasional Windows user like me upgrade to 11 from 10 ?

      Eventually, your Windows 10 computer will die, and it will no longer be possible to buy computers with Windows 10. So unless you have actual installation media for 10 (hahaha good luck finding THAT), you won't be able to stick with it. That leaves you choosing between the then-current version (perhaps 11, more likely by then it'll be 12 or 14; I don't suppose they'll make a Windows 13, more's the pity), some earlier version of Windo

  • I don't need that (Score:3)

    by bustinbrains ( 6800166 ) on Thursday November 10, 2022 @03:56PM (#63041845)

    What I REALLY want from Task Manager is the ability to force specific executables to specific CPU affinities. Adobe Cloud products and Windows Update are such huge startup hogs and cause so much system load at boot that this computer's USB hub can't keep up and the connections drop out due to communication timeouts (I've got a lot of USB devices attached). The only fix that works is to fire up Task Manager and work my way manually through the process list and set the CPU affinity of any process that starts taking more than a dozen seconds of CPU to one core. When you've got 100+ processes all vying for CPU time at boot, they all starve the OS of basic functionality. Shoving all the CPU-heavy processes onto one core frees up enough CPU overhead for the important stuff. If that could be automated via reasonable threshold detection, I'd be a happy camper!

    • I'd rather they use more intelligent thread scheduling myself.

      Windows has always been terrible about loading up a whole CPU while all the others idle, going back to NT 4.

    • IIRC Windows Update relies on task scheduler to start the service, it doesn't run by default. You might play with the "triggers" in Task Scheduler\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate to see if you can get it to run in a more friendly way.

      I get your larger point though. Sometimes I wish I could 'nice' a process.

  • I'll find the search box right next to the OneDrive advertisements and other ads for Microsoft services I don't want anything to do with?

  • "Windows 11"

    • please not that malware

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by jonadab ( 583620 )
      I think you're trying to be funny, but it's really not that funny. My experience with Windows 10 suggests that indeed, the problem is usually in kernel space. Specifically, almost every time I *think* there's a wayward process consuming all system resources, it turns out there's not, and the system is just needlessly I/O bound because the filesystem implementation and/or virtual memory system are trash. There's no wayward process at all, the operating system is just terrible.

  • And way less crap like shutdown menu ads.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kmoser ( 1469707 )
      And less editorialization built into Bing that tries to dissuade you from installing Chrome or Firefox. The last thing I want is a search engine telling me which browser I should use.

  • Alt-F (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Malc ( 1751 ) on Thursday November 10, 2022 @04:41PM (#63041981)

    Why not Ctrl-F like every other Windows application when you want to do a find? Alt keys have different semantics.

  • Sounds like Process Explorer [wikipedia.org] from SysInternals, before Microsoft acquired it.

  • It was about time (Score:3)

    by DonkeyG5 ( 1674048 ) on Thursday November 10, 2022 @05:11PM (#63042043)

    Any list with more than five items should have a search box.

  • Even Microsoft doesn't know what the hell is going on behind the scenes of their own OS.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by jonadab ( 583620 )
      More likely they don't care (which is why they aren't worried about fixing the actual problems) and are just doing this in an ill-fated attempt to get the complainers to shut up.

      It's true that the process management tools on Windows are trash, but that's always been true on every Microsoft operating system, even Seven. That's NOT why windows 8/10/11 is so unpopular with users. The big problem is that the filesystem and virtual memory implementations are trash; among other consequences, this means the syst

  • Hope it works better than its File Explorer search (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Tony Isaac ( 1301187 ) on Thursday November 10, 2022 @06:45PM (#63042221) Homepage

    Sometimes, File Explorer can't even find a file when I type the exact file name in the search field. Or it find everything under the sun that _shouldn't_ match. Hope they do a better job with this search.

    • Not bloody likely. Explorer's built-in search tool was utterly broken after the search 4.0 update for XP, and it's been broken exactly the same way to this day (or at least since the last time I touched Win10).

      Anyway, I've noticed that if you add wildcards to everything, it tends to fix most problems. If you're looking for a file named "submarine" and Windows can't find it, try typing "submarine*". No, you shouldn't need a wildcard for that, but it usually works. Sometimes partial word searches will wor

    • Windows has done strange things with indexing over the years. Originally, just about everything was indexed; now, very little seems to be by default. If you have a folder with a lot of files you plan to search, I'd recommend opening up the Indexing Options control panel ("control.exe /name Microsoft.IndexingOptions") and manually including that folder in the list of indexed folders.

      • Yeah, been there, done that. There are a million individual checkboxes to check. And if you check them all, you get meaningless results, and your entire computer slows down.

  • With innovative breakthroughs of this caliber, no wonder that MS is admired by absolutely everybody.
  • An ad box
  • Windows 11 has been a problem to maintain. Attempting to have any privacy on it is time consuming. The UI slows the user. The Start menu is trash. The only redeeming feature Windows 11 adds: rounded corners.

  • I they use the same code they use for search in Outlook, it'll be completely broken.

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