ps is essential and inscrutable - a wall of columns, cryptic flags to remember, and output you usually have to grep to make sense of. procs is the readable modern take. It shows processes in a colorized, aligned table with human-friendly units, lets you search by name without piping through grep, and can render the process tree so you see what spawned what.
Find a Process Without the Ritual
Search is a positional argument, not a grep pipeline:
# All processes, nicely formatted
procs
# Everything matching a name
procs php-fpm
# Show the parent/child tree
procs --tree
Readable by Default
procs adds columns ps makes you work for - like how long a process has run and, on some setups, TCP ports and docker container names - and colorizes them so the important bits stand out. The tree view is genuinely useful for understanding a process hierarchy, and searching by name covers the most common reason anyone runs ps at all.
Rough Edges and Limitations
- Not universally installed. ps is everywhere; procs is a thing you add.
- A snapshot, not a monitor. For live, continuously updating views, a tool like btop fits better.
- Platform differences. Some columns depend on OS support.
For the everyday "is that process running and what's its PID" question, procs is faster to use and far easier to read than ps piped through grep.
Internal link suggestion: link "continuously updating views" to the btop or bottom post for live system monitoring.