One extremely cool (but little known) new feature in Emacs 23 was the addition of proced.

proced basically allows you to run top inside Emacs and monitor/control processes via it. Here’s how it looks in action:

proced

Normally you’d use M-x proced to start the command, but as mentioned earlier I find it extremely useful and therefore I bind it to C-x p (inspired by dired’s C-x d):

(global-set-key (kbd "C-x p") #'proced)

See proced-mode (C-h f proced-mode) for a description of features available in Proced buffers.

Some of you might have noticed that the screenshot in the post is taken under GNOME, which is kind of strange considering I’m an OS X user. Unfortunately proced does not work on OS X (but, perhaps surprisingly, it works on Windows).

The C-x p keybinding works out-of-the box on Prelude.