Bhaskar Chowdhury has a nice video on using proced in Emacs. He covers many, but not all of the things you can do with it. As Chowdhury says, proced is best thought of as a top substitute built into Emacs. I don’t think it’s quite a full blown top substitute but it does have many of the same capabilities and does move us closer to never having to leave Emacs.
As most of you know, I do most of my work on my MacBook laptop and for a long time proced didn’t really work on a Mac. But at least since 2018 it’s been working fine on the Mac. After watching Chowdhury’s video, I fired up proced to see if I could find any shortcomings—I couldn’t. Everything that Chowdhury showed worked fine on my MacBook.
Proced is perfect for a quick check on things when you don’t want to have to context switch out of Emacs. It’s just another example of how Emacs provides a nearly complete operating environment. It is as I’ve often said a light weight Lisp Machine. Most of us will never have to opportunity to work on a Lisp Machine but Emacs does provide a hint of what it was like.
Proced gives you top-like information in an Emacs buffer. That’s nice because you can use all the usual Emacs searching and navigation commands in that buffer. You many not use proced all that often but it’s perfect when you need it.