2010-06-14

Major changes in the Xfce Task Manager going 1.0

It's done. The task manager application available in Xfce for quite some years is now available with major changes. It has been rewritten from scratch, with GtkBuilder UI definitions and GObjects, everything is fresh and clean. The application has support for Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD and OpenSolaris.

Let's start by visual changes:
  • The buttons at the bottom are gone, the progress bars at the top are vanished, say hello to a toolbar with buttons and monitors.
  • You read well, monitors are in, they show a graph of the CPU and memory usage by time.
  • A status bar is visible at the bottom, it displays a general information about the system usage.
  • Icons are displayed beneath the task names.

Let's continue with less visual:
  • Tasks that start are displayed with a green background for a short delay and tasks that terminate with a red background.
  • Tasks which state is changing are temporarily displayed with a yellow background. This covers tasks changing their state from idle to running, vice versa and etc.
  • The tree views context menu contains the same actions as before, sending signals to the task and changing the priority. They have been polished however, for example the continue and stop signals aren't shown altogether anymore, and there are only five priorities to set ranging from Very low to Very high.
  • The tree view columns can be reordered as you wish.
  • An optional status icon can be activated allowing you to hide the application.
  • It is possible to display percentage values with more precision.
  • And finally, the default refresh rate is 750ms and it can be switched from 500ms up to 10s.

And the result is as follows:


The application is fully translated into fifteen languages!

Go to project webpage.