davepl

Well, it started as an argument over whether you could vibe code Microsoft Word today. I didn't think so. But I figured... maybe something simpler like Task Manager. But you can't just tell Claude, "Hey, write a task manager!" Well, you can, but it'll be hot garbage.

Then my kid blew out his appendix and needed surgery, so I had a couple of days in waiting rooms to tinker with the idea. I broke out my new M5 MacBook Air, and I put together a 107-page spec, like I was some caffeine-addled PM from the 90s. Everything you could ever want to know about a task manager, how it works, what it should do, and what it should look like.

By the time he was out of the hospital, I had a rough app working. But then he started bleeding internally, needed emergency surgery and a blood transfusion. Happy to say he's all better now - but suffice to say I had the rest of the week to tinker as he healed.

But why write a Task Manager? Because when I wrote the original in '95, it was on a P90 or something equally weak. Updating, scrolling, and painting without using more than a percent or two of the CPU was the modest goal.

Now that we have 5 GHz CPUs and GPUs to help, why not push the limits? Animate everything at 60Hz, instead of once a second. History mouse tracking, a summary page, and all the features I would have added then if the hardware had allowed it.

My autism leads me to embrace neon and high contrast in a way that's not to everyone's taste, so there's a saturation slider to control the color. But this one goes to 11.

You can also select from a bunch of DEC VT220-inspired themes like Green Phosphor, Amber, or White. And I added Blue to match my VSCode theme!

The code is fully native: Direct2D/DirectComposition on Windows, UIKit on Mac, and Qt on Linux. The UI communicates with a shared CPP core, which branches out to platform-specific helpers. There's NO electron, HTML, JSON, etc.

Thanks to David and Rutger for their help along the way, I couldn't have done it this quickly on three platforms without them!

If you've got some cycles to spare, give it a try and let me know if you run into any issues!