I'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.
If 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.
The 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.
If 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.
My 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.
Yes. 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.
“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.
I 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.
First 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.
The 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.
I 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.
> 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.
The thing that kills linux is being out of RAM (but, to my recollection, not at all Windows - worst-case there'd be a pop-up asking for which process to close (still a GUI! and giving a choice!!)). I lived for a long time with a linux mint system where full RAM meant that even a ctrl+alt+f2 login might take minutes to process, or even just time out. Maybe things are somewhat better now (I also have earlyoom installed) but out-of-memory still is an extremely significant annoyance at its absolute best.
edit: disabled earlyoom & started a process that continuously allocates memory, still happens; ctrl+alt+f2 doesn't respond ever (DE ofc is frozen), and a htop over ssh gives a repaint every couple minutes if I'm lucky, but is useless; just rebooted via the physical reboot button after 30 minutes. Utterly unreasonable behavior.
The reason for this is that in Windows the DE is part of the system so it knows what to keep in memory.
On Linux the DE and shell and htop is just another program so when the system is under high memory pressure those things also get swapped out and back in when they need to run. Thrashing.
If you run something like memlockd to keep vital binaries from being swapped out I'm sure you will see that behaviour improve.
Yes. I've been known to walk away from the computer to get dinner, and come back an hour or so later. Usually by then it's sorted itself out, but not always. Interestingly, Slack is always in a bad state after such a freeze, and needs to be forceably restarted, but everything else is fine. It's generally simpler just to force a reboot.
Funny how user experiences differ. I've had Task Manager fail to open because I dared to unzip a file on a slow harddrive. It's unreliable quite often.
From 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...
F5 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?
There'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.)
Great 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.
this 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.
It 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.
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.
I knew everything was going downhill when I saw the windows 8 back button. It looked like it’d been hastily drawn by me in MSPaint for a school assignment. Nothing was aligned, and the arrow was actually pixelated on my 720p laptop screen
I’ve started to browse the web on 80% by default because it’s preposterous and ridiculous. I don’t want fancy designs. I want boring predictable accessible UIs with maximum amount of information on one screen.
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
Except for windows 98 control panel, windows 2000 control panel, windows xp control panel, windows vista control panel and windows 10 control panel and system settings.
> 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.
And then Microsoft let their employees use any machine/OS they wanted and all the designers promptly choose MacBooks, and now Windows is slowly morphing into macOSLite. Taking all the most annoying design concepts from macOS and trying to unsuccessfully merge or replace them with the very thoroughly designed and developed Windows conventions.
The shortcut isn't shown though, possibly at least in part because it's not a shortcut to that option. Try selecting the Normal speed, then holding Ctrl, and activating the menu - note that the Normal speed is still highlighted. And yet the display is still paused!
(Of course, just because it's not a shortcut to that option specifically, that doesn't mean that the current solution of not showing this shortcut anywhere is the right one.)
It's undiscoverable enough that lots of people (including myself) had no idea that this was possible, though!
Not saying that as a criticism of this particular application. Discoverability is a very hard problem (which is probably why the modern trend is to just give up on it entirely). I'm glad that Microsoft didn't completely neglect it here.
Edit: Does View -> Update Speed -> Paused do what it implies? Does it pause all updates? because that's not what I want here... what I want is to stop the reordering of the items in the list, not to stop the updating of the items.
I wish more operating systems had adopted macOS's feature to search through menu bar items, which also automatically points to where it is in the menu.
> 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.
My favorite is when this happens in a tool I’ve used for years just because I have a new account flag, like signing into Slack at a new job.
Bonus points if it’s completely unskippable or keeps happening as you touch each part of the app during use.
Ah my arch-nemesis, the unskippable, rigidly timed "How to use the controls" tutorial that requires me to click ok to advance through every control, at the beginning of every single one of the several dozen mandatory, annual training modules that corporate requires I sit through.
Windows is also like that - Shift + right click presents a different context menu on Explorer icons, taskbar shortcuts, and probably in some other places.
It's different now with Windows 11. Regular right click brings up a new metro-style simplified menu. Shift+Righr click brings up the classic right menu with the full menu. The new menu has maybe 7 items while the old is at 20+.
I believe the new system was an attempt to get rid of all the cruft that has accumulated into the right click menu over the years. Notably it does not show any actions added by third party programs or file extension handlers.
Oh man, if there's any way to guarantee I won't notice your features, that's it. Please also freeze half the app and jump your wizard modal around the screen so I've no easy way to dismiss it.
And the only thing worse is games having cutscenes that explain 'feature X' in 'BOOMING EPIC VOICE' for everything I click in the menu. Looking at you, Back4Blood.
These kinds of features are what breaks in new Windows releases.
For example: in windows explorer you can start typing the name of the file and it will character by character match it to a file. This got reduced to just the first character when Win11 shipped (now fixed).
>"tour of new features" wizard spammed at the user when they're opening your app
If you ever see these in an app it's a sign the team has a talent problem. People actually with talent to solve problems with the app would actually tweak the interfaces to make the tools discoverable or better. Teams with low talent (Modern Adobe etc) just work on spamming the front of house with messaging (Written in web tech that flashes up as a white rectangle first, obvs) in the hopes of changing user actions rather than actually working on the product itself.
Once I realized this I see this everywhere and the products that do it just never evolve or get better.
Apple is a good example. The UI is mostly simple enough that no extra guidance is needed. But when signing up, they do show a few slides about how to use gestures and include a “tips” app if you want to know more. Most of these tips being stuff most people just work out themselves.
While a bit less convenient, Alt+V, U, P/N (and Alt+V, R) are discoverable.
The bigger problem I see is that Microsoft programs don't come with adequate documentation any more like they used to (which was called "online help", though really offline in today's terminology).
> The bigger problem I see is that Microsoft programs don't come with adequate documentation any more like they used to (which was called "online help", though really offline in today's terminology).
It used to be delivered with printed documentation.
> 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.
Yes to this. The Task Manager does have a menu entry for this (View -> Update Speed -> Paused). If they had written "Ctrl" to the right of "Paused" (as used to be the norm), it would be much more discoverable.
(Incidentally, when I hold Ctrl and open that menu, the update speed still displays what was selected before, e.g. "Low". So the Ctrl thing was probably implemented as a hack that bypasses the menu.)
Oh god you’ve hit a nerve. I’ve never learned anything useful from a forced tour.
I’ve been in meetings where we’re discussing adding these, and the intentions all seem to be “we want to help users find things” but they’re somehow totally ineffective at that job.
ALL the information at once, presented in a way you can’t leave or return, is just the wrong solution. I honestly think it’s just assumed these help users because someone saw some other product use it once.
Forced tours strongly remind me of bad presentations given by people trying to wipe their hands clean of responsibility.
They don't want to admit their monolithic UI is a mess. I miss the days when apps were much simpler and bundled together as a suite instead of one foolishly consistent... thing.
Keyboard shortcuts are soooo 1990s, don’t you know?
Only the old ladies waiting for retirement in the typing pool use them.
We’re web now! Two-point-oh. Electron.
And anyway, the UX designers getting half a million total comp to throw things together in artistic ways assure me that their masterworks can’t be sullied by arbitrary lines randomly strewn over their elegant typography.
The QA team didn’t complain either. How could they? We let them all go years ago! Bunch of complainers.
You know who doesn’t complain? Our happy users, especially since we’ve redirected them to a feedback forum where they can keep each other entertained and not bother us with their issues.
I mean sure, there have been a few calls by disabled users, but the UX team uses only Macs and couldn’t repro the issue.
This 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.
It'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.
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.
Yes, it's pretty great but for some reason I never find the time to learn it properly. I've used it to call directly into .Net assemblies, that was pretty fun and rewarding.
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.
Yeah, 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.
> 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.
Because 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.
There'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.
That 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.
Shift + Right Click shows the classic right click menu. I'd prefer a setting to turn it off, but it's just muscle memory for me now and I never see the new menu.
How about they replace notepad.exe with something offering the bare minimum of what Linux users get in the default text editors of their Desktop Environments?
I 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.
> 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".
I 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.
I 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.
Or 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.
My 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
147 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 199 ms ] threadPerhaps what you meant was solely by the engine RPM.
But you should've probably discovered View -> Update Speed :)
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.
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.
edit: disabled earlyoom & started a process that continuously allocates memory, still happens; ctrl+alt+f2 doesn't respond ever (DE ofc is frozen), and a htop over ssh gives a repaint every couple minutes if I'm lucky, but is useless; just rebooted via the physical reboot button after 30 minutes. Utterly unreasonable behavior.
On Linux the DE and shell and htop is just another program so when the system is under high memory pressure those things also get swapped out and back in when they need to run. Thrashing.
If you run something like memlockd to keep vital binaries from being swapped out I'm sure you will see that behaviour improve.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Except for windows 98 control panel, windows 2000 control panel, windows xp control panel, windows vista control panel and windows 10 control panel and system settings.
And then Microsoft let their employees use any machine/OS they wanted and all the designers promptly choose MacBooks, and now Windows is slowly morphing into macOSLite. Taking all the most annoying design concepts from macOS and trying to unsuccessfully merge or replace them with the very thoroughly designed and developed Windows conventions.
(Of course, just because it's not a shortcut to that option specifically, that doesn't mean that the current solution of not showing this shortcut anywhere is the right one.)
Not saying that as a criticism of this particular application. Discoverability is a very hard problem (which is probably why the modern trend is to just give up on it entirely). I'm glad that Microsoft didn't completely neglect it here.
Edit: Does View -> Update Speed -> Paused do what it implies? Does it pause all updates? because that's not what I want here... what I want is to stop the reordering of the items in the list, not to stop the updating of the items.
My favorite is when this happens in a tool I’ve used for years just because I have a new account flag, like signing into Slack at a new job.
Bonus points if it’s completely unskippable or keeps happening as you touch each part of the app during use.
I believe the new system was an attempt to get rid of all the cruft that has accumulated into the right click menu over the years. Notably it does not show any actions added by third party programs or file extension handlers.
Oh man, if there's any way to guarantee I won't notice your features, that's it. Please also freeze half the app and jump your wizard modal around the screen so I've no easy way to dismiss it.
And the only thing worse is games having cutscenes that explain 'feature X' in 'BOOMING EPIC VOICE' for everything I click in the menu. Looking at you, Back4Blood.
For example: in windows explorer you can start typing the name of the file and it will character by character match it to a file. This got reduced to just the first character when Win11 shipped (now fixed).
If you ever see these in an app it's a sign the team has a talent problem. People actually with talent to solve problems with the app would actually tweak the interfaces to make the tools discoverable or better. Teams with low talent (Modern Adobe etc) just work on spamming the front of house with messaging (Written in web tech that flashes up as a white rectangle first, obvs) in the hopes of changing user actions rather than actually working on the product itself.
Once I realized this I see this everywhere and the products that do it just never evolve or get better.
No walk thrus with arrow pointers and text boxes.
The bigger problem I see is that Microsoft programs don't come with adequate documentation any more like they used to (which was called "online help", though really offline in today's terminology).
It used to be delivered with printed documentation.
Yes to this. The Task Manager does have a menu entry for this (View -> Update Speed -> Paused). If they had written "Ctrl" to the right of "Paused" (as used to be the norm), it would be much more discoverable.
(Incidentally, when I hold Ctrl and open that menu, the update speed still displays what was selected before, e.g. "Low". So the Ctrl thing was probably implemented as a hack that bypasses the menu.)
This is for press and hold which has never had shortcut text associated.
I’ve been in meetings where we’re discussing adding these, and the intentions all seem to be “we want to help users find things” but they’re somehow totally ineffective at that job.
ALL the information at once, presented in a way you can’t leave or return, is just the wrong solution. I honestly think it’s just assumed these help users because someone saw some other product use it once.
They don't want to admit their monolithic UI is a mess. I miss the days when apps were much simpler and bundled together as a suite instead of one foolishly consistent... thing.
Only the old ladies waiting for retirement in the typing pool use them.
We’re web now! Two-point-oh. Electron.
And anyway, the UX designers getting half a million total comp to throw things together in artistic ways assure me that their masterworks can’t be sullied by arbitrary lines randomly strewn over their elegant typography.
The QA team didn’t complain either. How could they? We let them all go years ago! Bunch of complainers.
You know who doesn’t complain? Our happy users, especially since we’ve redirected them to a feedback forum where they can keep each other entertained and not bother us with their issues.
I mean sure, there have been a few calls by disabled users, but the UX team uses only Macs and couldn’t repro the issue.
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.
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.
That dream is powershell.
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.
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.
Hey Microsoft, thanks for the spinner, but how about instead you un-ruin right clicking in explorer and give me my corners back.
you don't actually believe this
FWIW I always assumed anyone who really cared about this stuff was using Sysinternals's excellent Process Explorer instead.
"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".
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.
edit link https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36151607
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.