At long last! Few would have imagined that the Windows 11 Task Manager would be the feature that is getting so much love from Microsoft, yet here we are.
The software titan continues to roll out new additions here. After all, it is one of the OS’s more used components, appreciated by both novices and power users alike.
The Task Manager’s integral component was the reason Redmond persevered with the philosophy of keeping things as they were.
If it works, why fix it after all?
But the arrival of Windows 11—and with it the drive to modernize the various elements within the new operating system—meant that the software titan is now refining even the most critical features—and doing a pretty good job at it.
That is why one idea being tested right now is baking in a search feature into the Task Manager to allow users to conduct searches using the process name, publisher, or PID. The ultimate goal is to make finding a specific process much easier.
This new addition is currently hidden, but some keen individuals have been able to activate it.
And it looks just like you would expect it to:
Sweet!
The availability of the search bar will aid power users the most, as it will save them from scrolling through a long list of running processes (or hitting the key representing the first letter of the app on their keyboard) every time they want to kill a running process.
This is actually the reason why many of these folks relied on powerful alternatives like Process Explorer to kill a process without having to use Task Manager. Thankfully, that won’t be necessary now.
This new feature is currently hidden in the latest build of Windows 11, build 25236, which is now up for grabs in the Dev channel of the preview program.
For the record, it did first arrive in build 25231.
If you want to enable it on your test system, you can do so easily via ViveTool by navigating to its location in a terminal and entering the following command:
vivetool /enable /id:39420424
This should activate this new functionality on your system, and you can take it for a test drive.
