Merc

No mercy for runaway processes.

Merc finds, displays, and kills processes using window titles and fuzzy search. It detects file locks and force-removes stuck files and directories. Currently Windows-only, with the architecture to support other platforms.

• See what processes are doing — window titles, not just chrome.exe
• Fuzzy search — type a few characters, find what you need
• Multi-select — kill several processes at once
• Force-remove locked paths — detect who holds the lock, kill them, delete the path
• Resource stats — memory usage, CPU time, and weight class grading (-s)
• Pipeline-friendly — composable flags for scripting (-l, -k, -json)

Download merc.exe from the latest release and put it on your PATH.

Or build from source:

go install github.com/jack-work/merc/cmd/merc@latest

• Windows — currently the only supported platform (Linux/macOS planned via the Backend interface)
• fzf — required for interactive mode. Tested with fzf 0.62.0 (scoop). Install via winget install junegunn.fzf, scoop install fzf, or choco install fzf.

# Interactive: fuzzy-pick processes → kill selection
merc

# Force-remove a locked directory
merc -rm .\node_modules

# List processes (fzf protocol: PID\t{display})
merc -l

# List with resource stats and weight classes
merc -l -s

# JSON output
merc -json

# JSON with stats
merc -json -s

# Pipeline: pick with fzf, kill selection
merc -l | fzf -m --with-nth=2.. --delimiter=$'\t' | merc -k

# Include system/junk windows
merc -l -j

$ merc -rm .\out

  Blocked! These processes hold files under C:\project\out:

   40080  devenv                    MyProject - Visual Studio
  Kill devenv (PID 40080)? [y/N]: y
  Killing devenv (PID 40080)...

  Removed: C:\project\out

Merc is designed library-first. Import it to build your own frontend:

import "github.com/jack-work/merc"

// Without stats
procs, _ := merc.ListProcesses(false, false)
for _, p := range procs {
    fmt.Println(merc.FormatProcessLine(p))
}

// With stats and weight classes
procs, _ = merc.ListProcesses(false, true)
for _, p := range procs {
    fmt.Printf("%s  %s  %s\n", p.Name, merc.FormatBytes(p.MemoryBytes), p.WeightClass)
}

See the wiki for the full API reference and integration guide.

When -s is enabled, each process is graded into a weight class based on its relative resource consumption across all running processes:

The composite score is 0.6 × memory_percentile + 0.4 × cpu_percentile.

The README covers installation and daily use. For deeper topics — API reference, pipeline recipes, frontend integration — see the Wiki.

MIT