Process Monitor - Feature Requests

I have had a few months now to work with Process Monitor, and it certainly is amazing. The filtering capabilities are great, and the fact that the filters are not destructive makes slicing and dicing the data many ways quite simple. The ability to capture all of the data that the utility can capture makes it quite powerful, and the ability to get stack traces for each event is extremely useful.

 

Going off the observation that Process Monitor is currently at version 1.01, and the assumption that the utility will see further development, I have hopes that the following relatively small ideas will be taken into consideration for future releases, and that further discussion and conversation is sparked.

 

1) Allow for the use of CTRL+C to copy selected data to the clipboard.  Some data can be copied in this fashion, but from my experience not much. In many cases, one can right-click and choose "Copy" from the context menu, but that's inconvenient. For example, on Event properties, on the Event tab for a Profiling Interrupt, I can select the User and Kernel times and press CTRL+C, and the data will go to the clipboard. However, if I select the date, the result, or the sequence #, the only way to copy the selection is by using the mouse.

 

2) Along the same lines, it would be useful to have a "Copy details to clipboard" button on each tab of the Event properties - it would simply grab all of the displayed data and copy it to the clipboard with the click of a button. Or the use of a hotkey accelerator. This would have come in handy on the Stack tab, but there I was at least able to save the data to a CSV file and work with it in that fashion.

 

3) I would like to be able to sort by each of the columns displayed on Process tab of the Event's properties, in the "DLLs" section. It might also be nice to toggle display of path (this would affect sort as well), or perhaps add another column for just the module name.

 

4) In Options | "History Depth", the edit part of the spin control could be a bit wider - there is plenty of room on the dialog...

 

5) It might be inferred that I prefer to avoid using the mouse. As such, it pains me when there are no hotkeys on a dialog box. I find myself constantly wanting to "ALT+A" to add a filter on the "Process Monitor Filter" dialog, or "ALT+R" to remove, or whatever. Other dialogs, such as Configure Symbols, Select Columns, Show Unique Values, etc, could also benefit from hotkeys. I do love the fact that so many things in the main UI are accessible with the CTRL key - CTRL+L for the filter, CTRL+J for jump to, etc.

 

For further exploration / discussion:
-- I realize it can be difficult to determine what to do for an implementation of "Jump to" for certain classes - what would one "jump to" for a profiling interrupt, for example? For Process and Thread activity, one might wish to "Jump to" Dependency Walker for "Process Create" and "Load Image" operations. For "Thread Create" and "Thread Exit" events, however, a relevant action is not clear.  Does anyone have any thoughts or ideas?

 

1.  Mostly, I want to copy with CTRL+C, but the way I tend to expect applications to behave is that if I can select it / get an I-beam when hovering, I want to be able to use the "standard" CTRL+<KEY>s - CTRL+C to "Copy", CTRL+A to "Select All".  If the field is not RO, this would include CTRL+X to "Cut", CTRL+Z to "Undo", and DEL to delete.  (Many of the fields in Process Monitor are not editable, of course.)

 

2.  Welllllll, since you asked... I'm sure someone somewhere has written about what happens when someone is given a choice... A OR B becomes A AND B...  Seriously, I don't see that having the data copied without the labels would be that useful.  The "inspiration" for this came from the Event Viewer, which also includes the labels.

 

Again, thanks for taking the time to incorporate these requests into Process Monitor.