fkill

An interactive TUI process killer for macOS and Linux. Browse every process you own as a live hierarchy, filter it instantly, and kill exactly what you meant to kill.

Why

kill + ps + grep works until you have six node processes and one of them is spinning. fkill shows the process tree, so when you search for a helper you also see who owns it — and parents are always shown with the matches, styled yellow so you know what's a direct hit vs. context.

htop is great for watching, but hard to navigate when your goal is just finding and killing procs: every refresh re-sorts the list, so the process you were about to highlight keeps jumping around under the cursor. fkill's list is stable — tree order, never re-sorted — so what you're looking at stays where it is.

Features

• Hierarchical tree — every process rendered under its real parent with ├──/└── connectors
• Live filtering — multi-term AND, smart-case substring matching against the process name and pid (no path/args noise)
• Parent visibility — searching renderer shows the Chrome helper and its parent chain; direct matches are white, pulled-in parents are yellow
• Live CPU% per row — instantaneous rate computed from CPU-time deltas every refresh, color-coded (red ≥80%, yellow ≥25%) so a runaway process is obvious
• Killable-only list — non-root users only see processes they can actually kill; your own session chain (shell → terminal) is visible but locked
• Selection view — ctrl+l filters the list down to everything you've selected plus its parents, so you can review and deselect before pulling the trigger
• Details pane — full command line, pid/ppid, %cpu, %mem, uptime for the highlighted row

Install

macOS and Linux (Homebrew, prebuilt for Apple silicon/Intel and x86_64/aarch64 Linux):

brew install adibsaad/tap/fkill

Any platform, from source (requires the Rust toolchain — rustup):

cargo install --git https://github.com/adibsaad/fkill

Or build from a clone:

git clone https://github.com/adibsaad/fkill && cd fkill
cargo build --release && cp target/release/fkill ~/.local/bin/

Or run it in a Docker container (Linux):

docker build -t fkill .
docker run -d --name fkill fkill
docker exec -it fkill fkill

Usage

fkill

Key	Action
type	filter by name / pid (multi-word AND, smart-case)
↑/↓	move cursor
tab	toggle-select the highlighted process
ctrl+l	selection view — list only selected + parents, tab deselects
enter	kill all selected (confirm prompt)
ctrl+u	clear search
ctrl+r	refresh now (also auto-refreshes every 2s)
esc	back out of selection view / quit

Anything in your own session's ancestry (fkill → shell → terminal) is rendered struck-through and refused, so you can't nuke the terminal you're sitting in.

Notes

• Runs on macOS and Linux — both ps flavors (BSD and procps) expose the columns fkill needs, so no platform-specific flags
• Killing uses SIGKILL after an explicit confirm; failures (e.g. race-lost pids) are reported per-process in the status line