Windows Task Manager equivalent for OS X, showing more details than Activity Monitor?

Question

Being a Windows convert, I am looking for Task Manager equivalent for OS X.

Please do not recommend Activity Monitor, since it misses two important features of Task Manager:

• per process disk i/o (read, write, other)
• simple process description (like what is this 'mds' process? where does it live?)

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

atMonitor is a more advanced Activity Monitor. It definitely fulfils the second of your requirements, in that it provides quite a lot of information about each process.

As for per-process IO, the only way I know is the command line tool 'iotop' which comes with the Mac. Open Terminal.app in an administrator account and type:

sudo iotop

There may be some debugging output as the program runs, but it should show the information you want.

Answer 2

in terminal type

man ps

Answer 3

There's also a handy widget for your dashboard called iStat Pro. It's not the same as a task manager application but it does allow you to quickly and easily see your most interesting running processes (and a number of other useful stats about your Mac)