CoreView Task Manager

A cross-platform desktop task manager built with C++17 and [Dear ImGui]. Graphite-slate UI, teal/steel-blue accents, rounded geometry, and a soft hand-rolled glow — a reimagining of the system monitor, not a clone of one.

Features

• Processes tab — live, sortable, filterable process table (Name, PID, CPU %, Memory, Status, User). Search by name/PID/user, click any column header to sort, right-click a row for End Task / End Process Tree, both behind a confirmation dialog. Refreshes every second.
• Performance tab — compact scrollable dashboard:
  • CPU: overall usage graph + per-core meter bars
  • Memory: used/total with a graph
  • Disk: read/write throughput with graphs
  • Network: send/receive throughput with graphs
  • System uptime
• Logs tab — rolling event log of process start/stop events and kill actions, color-coded by level, filterable and searchable.
• Status bar — live process count, CPU load, memory usage, and the CoreView watermark.
• Keyboard-first: every core action has a shortcut (see below).
• Native performance data on every OS — no polling libraries, no shell-outs: Windows uses tlhelp32 / psapi / PDH, Linux reads /proc directly, macOS uses libproc, Mach host APIs, and IOKit.

Visual identity

CoreView trades the usual gray-and-blue task-manager look for a graphite-slate canvas (#0A0D12), signal-teal (#2FD9C4) and steel-blue (#4FA8FF) accents, generously rounded corners, and a lightweight glow effect drawn behind cards and the active tab — Dear ImGui has no native blur/shadow, so it's faked with nested translucent rounded rectangles of falling opacity (see src/ui_theme.cpp).

Project structure

taskmanager/
├── src/
│   ├── main.cpp              # entry point
│   ├── app.cpp / app.h       # window, main loop, shortcuts, tab bar, status bar
│   ├── process_tab.cpp/h     # Processes tab
│   ├── performance_tab.cpp/h # Performance tab
│   ├── logs_tab.cpp/h        # Logs tab
│   ├── system_info.cpp/h     # cross-platform data interface + formatting helpers
│   ├── ui_theme.cpp/h        # CoreView palette, style, glow effect, meter bars
│   └── platform/
│       ├── windows.cpp       # tlhelp32 / psapi / PDH
│       ├── linux.cpp         # /proc
│       └── macos.cpp         # libproc / Mach host APIs / IOKit
├── CMakeLists.txt
└── README.md

Dependencies

• CMake ≥ 3.16 and a C++17 compiler
• GLFW — window/input backend (auto-fetched via CMake FetchContent if not found on the system)
• Dear ImGui — fetched automatically at configure time, no manual vendoring needed
• OpenGL (system-provided on all three platforms)
• Windows only: pdh.lib, psapi.lib (both ship with the Windows SDK)
• Linux only: an OpenGL/GLX dev package (e.g. libgl1-mesa-dev) and X11/Wayland dev headers for GLFW if it needs to be fetched and built from source

On macOS, installing GLFW via Homebrew (brew install glfw) lets CMake find it without a network fetch. Dear ImGui is always fetched from source since it ships no CMake config of its own.

Building

git clone https://github.com/butaraul/CoreView-Task-Manager.git task manager
cd taskmanager
mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
make -j
./CoreViewTaskManager        # CoreViewTaskManager.exe on Windows

On Windows with Visual Studio:

cmake -S . -B build
cmake --build build --config Release

The binary is named CoreViewTaskManager (CoreViewTaskManager.exe on Windows).

Keyboard shortcuts

Shortcut	Action
Ctrl+F	Jump to Processes tab and focus the search box
Ctrl+K	End the selected task
Ctrl+R	Force an immediate refresh of process list and performance samples
Ctrl+Q	Quit
Tab	Cycle between Processes / Performance / Logs

On macOS, Cmd works as an alias for Ctrl in all of the above.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.