Process plugin is now a measure!

[Brian]

We have converted the Process plugin to a regular measure as of beta r3403.

https://docs.rainmeter.net/manual-beta/measures/process/

Like the other "old" plugins that are now measures, changing to the new syntax is purely optional. However, we do encourage new skins to use new correct syntax.

This change allows us to fix a timing issue with the expensive operation of gathering the list of all running processes, and then comparing them to the defined ProcessName option. The plugin attempted to run this expensive operation at different intervals depending on how many measures were using the plugin. It would then update all the referenced plugin measures manually which led to incorrect results at times - especially when using different UpdateDivider/Update values on the measures/skins.

The new measure corrects this timing issue.

-Brian

[Cariboudjan]

Any chance this measure can be used to pull that list of running apps?

[Brian]

Any chance this measure can be used to pull that list of running apps?

This is going to be difficult to "expose" to the skin. It is not uncommon to have 100+ processes running at the same time (albeit some use multiple instances like Chrome, Firefox, and svchost).

One option would be to use some sort of "index" to get the process name to a measure would most likely require a measure for each processes. That doesn't sound like a good idea given the amount of potential processes running at any one time. If you didn't include enough indexed measures, your list would be cut off missing some process names.

Another option would be outputting all names to a single measure, but that would create a huge string likely to be hundreds (or even thousands) of characters long. Sure you could then process it through Lua or other means, but this sounds like a worse idea than the "index" version.

On top of all this, I am sure it would not do much good to display processes like "dllhost" and "svchost" and the dozens of other Windows processes that are always running.

I can't see any practical application or need for this. The UsageMonitor plugin is going to get you closer to something "usable".

-Brian

[jsmorley]

I have 210 processes running. I can't see how I would even begin to use a listing of them in a skin in any way that provides any benefit.

Guess one could use a RunCommand measure to execute TaskList.exe to return the list, then parse it in Lua to pretty it up and such. Not sure I'd want to do that though, I'd be hesitant to spend that much CPU to execute an external command once a second.

[Cariboudjan]

I guess I should have specified specifically visible window apps, like the processes in the taskbar.