Vigil Task Manager

A fast, free and open source task manager for Linux and Windows — in the style of the Windows Task Manager.

No subscriptions. No "Pro" tier. No telemetry. No account. Just a task manager.

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Why Vigil?

Most Linux system monitors either look nothing like the Windows Task Manager people already know, or they are closed source / freemium. Vigil aims to be the task manager you would expect — Linux first, also on Windows — while staying:

• Free forever. Licensed under the GPL v3 (or later). Every feature is in the free version because there is no other version.
• Private. Vigil never connects to the internet. No telemetry, no update pings, no account.
• Light. A single native binary (Rust + egui). On a typical system the sampling thread uses well under 1 % of one CPU core at the default update speed; the full process scan only runs at full speed while a process list is on screen, and the UI only redraws when there is new data.
• Stable. Data collection runs in its own thread and recovers automatically from errors; vanished processes, missing permissions and exotic hardware are handled gracefully instead of crashing.
• Universal. Works on X11 and Wayland with GNOME, KDE Plasma, Xfce, Cinnamon, MATE, LXQt, Budgie, COSMIC, Sway, Hyprland, i3 and any other desktop — no toolkit lock-in.

Features

Vigil covers every page of the Windows Task Manager:

Page	What you get
Processes	Overview tiles for CPU, memory, disk, network and GPU (with temperatures); filter chips for All / Apps / Background / System and "hide idle"; collapsible groups, apps expandable to their child processes; heat-map colored CPU, memory, disk and GPU columns with totals in the header; optional PID, status, user, threads, priority, working set, virtual memory, start time and command line columns; instant search; a detail pane with live graphs and quick actions for the selected process.
Performance	Live graphs for CPU (overall or per logical processor, kernel time, temperature per core), Memory (usage, composition bar, committed, cached, swap, kernel memory, module temperature), every Disk (active time, read/write throughput, response time, temperature), every Network adapter (send/receive, IPv4/IPv6, MAC, link speed, Wi-Fi signal, temperature), every GPU (utilization, dedicated/shared memory, temperature, power, clock, fan), every Battery (charge, power draw, health, cycles, time remaining) and a Sensors view with every temperature, fan, voltage and power sensor. Hover a graph for exact values.
App history	CPU time, disk reads/writes and GPU time accumulated per application, kept across restarts, with "Delete usage history".
Startup apps	XDG autostart entries and user-enabled systemd user services on Linux; registry Run keys and Startup folders on Windows. Enable, disable, add, remove, open file location. Last boot time breakdown (systemd).
Users	Resource usage per user account, expandable to the user's processes, "End all processes".
Details	Sortable list or process tree of every process with technical columns (CPU time, nice/priority, threads, RSS, virtual memory, start time, command line, ...), kernel threads optional.
Services	systemd system and user services (OpenRC on non-systemd distributions, the Service Control Manager on Windows): status, PID, startup type; start, stop, restart, enable, disable; jump from a process to its service and back.

Process actions (context menu, toolbar and keyboard):

• End task (graceful), End process tree, Kill (force)
• Suspend / Resume
• Efficiency mode — lowest CPU priority plus idle I/O class on Linux; EcoQoS + idle priority class on Windows, exactly like Windows 11
• Set priority, Set affinity (choose CPU cores)
• Open file location, Search online (DuckDuckGo), Copy name / PID / path / command line
• Properties with tabs for general information, threads, open files and environment variables
• Run new task, optionally with administrator rights
• Actions on processes of other users can be retried as administrator via polkit (pkexec) on Linux or UAC on Windows.

More: export the process list as CSV, light / dark / system theme, zoom, adjustable update speed (0.5 s / 1 s / 4 s / paused), graph history length, always-on-top, per-core or whole-system CPU percentages, column chooser, persistent settings.

GPU support

Vendor / driver	Total utilization	Memory	Per-process usage
AMD (amdgpu)	✔	✔ VRAM + GTT	✔ (DRM fdinfo)
Intel (i915, xe)	✔ (DRM fdinfo)	—	✔ (DRM fdinfo)
NVIDIA (proprietary driver)	✔ (NVML)	✔	✔ (NVML)
NVIDIA (nouveau), ARM SoCs (msm, panfrost, v3d, ...)	where the driver exposes DRM fdinfo	—	where exposed

Temperatures and sensors

On Linux, Vigil reads the kernel's hwmon and thermal interfaces and maps every sensor to the device it belongs to: CPU (k10temp, coretemp, zenpower, ARM thermal zones), memory modules (spd5118, jc42), NVMe drives, SATA drives (needs the drivetemp kernel module: sudo modprobe drivetemp), network adapters, GPUs and batteries. Fans, voltages, currents and power sensors (e.g. nct6775, it87) appear in the Sensors view. On Windows, temperatures come from WMI thermal zones where the firmware provides them.

NVML is loaded at runtime only if present — there is no build-time or run-time dependency on NVIDIA software. GPU model names come from the system pci.ids database (package hwdata / pciutils).

Installation

Linux

Download the latest release from the Releases page:

Distribution	Package
Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Pop!_OS, elementary, Zorin, ...	vigil-task-manager_<version>_amd64.deb → sudo apt install ./vigil-task-manager_*.deb
Fedora, RHEL, Alma, Rocky, openSUSE, ...	vigil-task-manager-<version>.x86_64.rpm → sudo dnf install ./vigil-task-manager-*.rpm
Arch, Manjaro, EndeavourOS, ...	build with the included packaging/arch/PKGBUILD (makepkg -si)
Any distribution	vigil-<version>-linux-x86_64.tar.gz → extract, then ./install.sh (user) or sudo ./install.sh --system

Release binaries are linked against glibc 2.28, so they run on practically every distribution released since 2018 (Debian 10+, Ubuntu 18.10+, RHEL/Alma/Rocky 8+, Fedora 29+, openSUSE Leap 15.3+, ...). Builds for x86_64 and aarch64 are provided.

Runtime requirements (preinstalled on every desktop system): OpenGL 2.0 / OpenGL ES 2.0 (Mesa is fine, including software rendering), libxkbcommon and either X11 or Wayland. Optional: polkit for administrator actions, hwdata for GPU names.

Windows

Download vigil-<version>-windows-x86_64.zip, extract it and run vigil.exe. No installation, no admin rights needed (administrator actions will show the usual UAC prompt). Windows 10 and 11 are supported.

Build from source

You need a recent stable Rust toolchain (1.95 or newer, e.g. via rustup). No system development libraries are required.

git clone https://github.com/baba537/Vigil-Task-Manager.git
cd Vigil-Task-Manager
cargo build --release
./target/release/vigil

To build without NVIDIA support: cargo build --release --no-default-features.

Usage

vigil                      start the GUI
vigil --page performance   start on a page: processes, performance, history, startup, users, details, services, settings
vigil --snapshot           print a one-shot system summary (useful for bug reports) and exit
vigil --help

Keyboard shortcuts

Shortcut	Action
Ctrl+F	Search
Esc	Clear search / close dialog
Delete / Shift+Delete	End task / Kill
↑ ↓	Move selection
Ctrl+N	Run new task
F5	Refresh now
Ctrl+1 … Ctrl+7	Switch page
Ctrl+,	Settings
Ctrl + / Ctrl −	Zoom
Ctrl+Q	Quit

Platform notes

• Administrator actions on Linux use polkit (pkexec). Ending, re-prioritizing or pinning processes of other users opens your desktop's authentication dialog. Services are controlled through systemctl, which asks polkit itself.
• Service managers: systemd (system + user services) and OpenRC are supported. On other init systems (runit, s6, ...) everything except the Services page works.
• Apps vs. background processes on Linux: Vigil reads the systemd cgroup of each process (GNOME, KDE Plasma, COSMIC and others launch apps into app-*.scope units) and matches it with the installed .desktop files. On systems without systemd, executables are matched against the .desktop files instead.
• Always on top depends on the window manager; some Wayland compositors do not allow applications to request it.
• Per-process network usage is not available on Linux without root-level packet capture, so Vigil does not show it rather than guessing.
• Why no Flatpak or Snap? Sandboxed packages cannot see the processes of the host system, which a task manager needs. Native packages are provided instead.
• Rendering problems (very old or broken GPU drivers): start with LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1 vigil.

How it works

src/
├── main.rs            entry point, command line
├── app.rs             window shell: navigation, header, status bar, actions, settings
├── sampler.rs         background sampling thread (panic-safe, sleeps between ticks)
├── model.rs           platform independent data model
├── history.rs         graph history and per-app usage accounting
├── settings.rs        persisted preferences
├── platform/
│   ├── linux/         /proc + /sys parsers, DRM fdinfo GPU accounting, XDG autostart, systemd/OpenRC
│   ├── windows/       sysinfo + Win32 (priority, EcoQoS, affinity, services, registry startup)
│   └── nvidia.rs      runtime-loaded NVML
└── ui/                one module per page plus widgets, dialogs and theme

On Linux Vigil reads /proc and /sys directly: per refresh only three small files are read per process (stat, statm, io); everything that cannot change during a process' lifetime is cached. Snapshots are produced off the UI thread, the UI caches sorted/grouped rows per snapshot and only renders visible rows.

Privacy

Vigil does not open any network connection. Settings and app history are stored locally (~/.local/share/io.github.baba537.vigil/ on Linux, %APPDATA%\io.github.baba537.Vigil\data\ on Windows). "Search online" opens your browser only when you click it.

Contributing

Bug reports, feature requests and pull requests are welcome! Please read CONTRIBUTING.md. When reporting a bug, include the output of vigil --snapshot and your distribution / desktop environment.

License

Vigil is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This guarantees that Vigil — and any fork of it — stays open source.