macOS 14+ · Apple Silicon & Intel · Free & open source · No dependencies
You press Ctrl+Shift+Esc a hundred times a week on Windows. Then you sit at a Mac, and it's Activity Monitor — different layout, different words, no heatmap, no muscle memory.
This is the actual Task Manager. Same seven tabs. Same colours. Same graphs. On your Mac.
- Download the DMG
- Open it, drag Task Manager into Applications
- Right-click the app → Open (just the first time)
Why right-click the first time? macOS blocks apps that haven't paid Apple's $99/year signing fee, and shows a scary "could not verify" box. Right-click → Open tells macOS you trust it. You only do this once. Every line of code is in this repo if you'd rather check.
| Tab | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Processes | Every app and process, with the heatmap that turns yellow → red as things get busy |
| Performance | Live CPU, memory, disk, network and GPU graphs |
| App history | How much CPU and network each app has used over time |
| Startup apps | What launches when you log in — turn things off |
| Users | Who's signed in and what they're running |
| Details | The dense list: PID, threads, priority |
| Services | Background system services |
Right-click anything to End task, End process tree, Suspend or Resume — exactly like Windows.
macOS won't let any app read these, so instead of showing you a made-up number, it shows nothing:
- GPU % per process — the overall GPU graph works, the per-app column doesn't
- Startup impact — macOS never measures it
- Set affinity — no such control on macOS
There's also a one-time password prompt if you want to see system processes like WindowServer. You can say no and everything else still works.
git clone https://github.com/yatindma/task-manager-for-mac.git
cd task-manager-for-mac
./build.sh
open "Task Manager.app"You'll need Xcode installed. That's it — no packages to install, nothing to configure.
Swift 6 + SwiftUI, built with SwiftPM, zero third-party dependencies, about 5 MB.
Some of it was more interesting than it should have been — the notes are here, including the one where every process reported 41× too little CPU because Apple's docs say "nanoseconds" and mean something else.
MIT — do what you like. See LICENSE.
Issues and PRs welcome — and if this saved you some muscle memory, a ⭐ helps other people find it.
Reporting a wrong number? Tell us your Mac's chip and what Activity Monitor says — that comparison has already caught real bugs.