Ghost Process Sniper 2.0.0

Ghost Process Sniper 2.0 is a verdict-first redesign: every screen now leads with one clear answer, stopping understands what it is about to interrupt, search reaches every running process, and the radar measures everything while doing less work.

Highlights

Smarter, safer stopping

• Every stop knows what it is interrupting — apps, editors, databases, containers, git, package installs, builds, dev servers, and model runners — and judges the risk on everything it would really hit.
• Apps are asked to quit like ⌘Q first, so they can save your work. Databases and prefork servers shut down through their main process (Postgres gets its fast shutdown).
• A protection floor that can never be crossed: Ghost itself, the terminal it runs in, loginwindow, WindowServer, launchd, and system processes.
• One-page stop sheet with better alternatives (stop the supervisor that keeps restarting it, or only the leaking helper), live progress, and a plain result. Confirming needs ⌘↩, so Return alone can never stop anything.
• Quick Stop wherever a culprit appears — named for what it does, like Quit TextEdit… or Shut Down postgres….

Search every running process

• Finds apps, helpers, commands, paths, PIDs, and listening ports — including processes outside the watch scope. Filters like port:3000, cpu>50, kind:, and is:, with typo-tolerant fallback.

Sharper detection

• Slow leaks (5 MB/min over twenty minutes) are caught and pinned to the responsible helper; language servers, dev servers, and databases an editor starts are their own families.
• CPU is judged from twenty minutes of exact CPU time: builds are expected bursts, a process pinned at one core is a busy loop.
• Forgotten processes are recognized by how they were launched, idleness, age, deleted working directories, and idle ports.

Faster and lighter

• Every process is measured on every scan, and scans adapt to what's on screen, battery, Low Power Mode, and heat.
• Learning is written behind in memory: in a 300-family test, 30 scans went from 9,684 database row writes to 318.

Temperatures

• M3 and M4 support, sensor discovery on newer Apple chips, and heat attributed to whole jobs (a make -j10 build is one job; Spotlight, Time Machine, and the Docker VM are labelled as system work).

Interface

• Verdict-first popover, Overview, and family pages; All Processes is a native sortable table; Back/Forward (⌘[ ⌘]); the Engine screen moved into Settings › Diagnostics.

Full details: CHANGELOG.

Upgrading from 1.0

Replace the app in Applications. Your history and settings are migrated on first launch, and a backup of the database (Radar.sqlite.bak-v…) is kept before any upgrade that drops tables.

Install

Download GhostProcessSniper-2.0.0.dmg below (universal: Apple silicon + Intel, macOS 26 or later), open it, and drag Ghost Process Sniper into Applications. It lives in the menu bar; choose Open Dashboard for the full console.

First launch

This build is signed ad hoc but not notarized by Apple, so macOS asks you to confirm it once:

1. Open the app and click Done on the warning.
2. Open System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll to Security, and click Open Anyway.

Or, in Terminal: xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/Ghost Process Sniper.app"

Verify the download

SHA-256  50ee32a71fdf9786cbe33433465ccc93e8faac301e08645468ddf6c0ad0c833c  GhostProcessSniper-2.0.0.dmg

shasum -a 256 GhostProcessSniper-2.0.0.dmg should print the same value.