Show HN: Procinsh – A 3D Linux process inspector | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Procinsh – A 3D Linux process inspector

github.com

47 pointsa_kawashiro13 comments

I built procinsh, a 3D Linux process inspector inspired by Ghost in the Shell.

It visualizes running processes and their relationships in a 3D UI. Process activity, memory maps, file I/O, and socket communication are reflected in real time.

The backend is written in Rust and uses procfs, eBPF, ptrace, and process_vm_readv to collect information from the system.

Demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rnWvN8ej2A

More details about the motivation and implementation: https://akawashiro.com/articles/procinsh-en

This is beautiful! I'm so excited to see more and more projects finally move into the third dimension for visualization of runtime and static data. I'm curious if you've played with rendering memory at all - textual bits, that is. I've been working on that end, a high performance text renderer that focuses on 3D blitted glyphs in the hundreds of millions, and I can absolutely see that sitting on top of these process towers and grids to see running memory and executing code! Any chance you're open to a side chat in some Discord or email chain?

"It's a UNIX system!"

https://youtu.be/dFUlAQZB9Ng

> AGENTS.md

You didn't build a thing, dude. You had a machine build it for you.

> You didn't build a thing, dude. You had a machine build it for you.

But when agents hack another company, it's not the LLM that did it but the guy who asked it to.

Strange contradiction.

this looks something pulled straight from a hacker tv show that I would have thought fake as hell

Over 20 years ago we had a doom in which your processes were represented by monsters and killing them sent the kill signal. :)

now I can finally live my dream of saying "it's a unix system I know this" in front of my family and non-technical friends while pulling this thing up and inspecting my bloated tmux processes running 20 claude code instances

"Its the Gibson - it's finding us too fast!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bmz67ErIRa4&t=63s

You could do that before, because that scene was actually a file manager written for UNIX called fsn. But there have been ports / reimplementations of it since such as fsv https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_System_Visualizer

It’s probably the only time in cinema history that a “hacker” visual effect was actually UNIX.

Did a procfs scraper once, handling pids vanishing mid-read took me ages.

Obligatory reference to psDoom [1]. There’s something quite fun about killing the monster labeled “init” and poof! Your whole system is now dead.

[1] https://psdoom.sourceforge.net/

Look at that FPS!! Now we need another inspector to monitor Procinsh.

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