witr ☆

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Description:
Why is this running?

Type: Formula | Tracked Since: Dec 27, 2025

Links: Homepage | GitHub | formulae.brew.sh

Stars: 2,455 | Forks: 45 | Language: Go | Category: System utilities

Tags: monitoring process-management system-utilities go cli

Install: brew install witr

About:
witr (Why Is This Running?) is a command-line tool that helps developers identify and diagnose processes consuming system resources. It provides a real-time, interactive view of running processes, their resource usage, and dependencies. Its main value is quickly pinpointing the cause of performance issues or unexpected behavior on a system.

Key Features:

Interactive real-time process monitoring
Detailed resource usage breakdown (CPU, memory, I/O)
Process tree visualization to show dependencies
Lightweight and fast execution written in Go

Use Cases:

Diagnosing sudden high CPU or memory usage on a development machine
Identifying background processes or services that are unexpectedly running

Alternatives:

htop – More feature-rich general system monitor, but witr focuses specifically on answering 'why' a process is running.
pstree – Shows process hierarchy, but witr adds interactive filtering and integrated resource metrics.

Version History

Detected	Version	Rev	Change	Commit
Dec 27, 2025 3:59pm		0	META	fd052028