This program is not very useful on its own. It's a plugin for EventGhost. EventGhost is an automation tool for MS Windows which listens for events -- whether user-triggered (like the press of a hotkey) or system events (such as the screensaver activating) -- and runs actions you specify. (It's like Tasker for Android, or Cuttlefish for Ubuntu.)

TaskMonitorPlus is a fork/expansion of the Task Monitor (aka simply Task) plugin for EventGhost. The original Task Monitor plugin generates events when a window opens, closes, flashes, or gains or loses focus. But the event contains nothing but the name of the executable which created the window.

TaskMonitorPlus still produces these events, but now they come with a payload. The eg.event.payload produced by an event is an object (named WindowInfo, if you're curious) with the following attributes and methods:

• title: the title of the window
• window_class: the internal class name for the window
• is_visible: whether the window is visible (technically this is always True since Task Monitor ignores invisible windows)
• is_enabled: whether the window is enabled (I don't know what this means, but it always seems to be true)
• hwnd: the internal ID for the window
• pid: the process ID for thet executable owning the window
• name: the executable name of the process owning the window (same as in the event itself)
• GetParent(): returns a new object representing the parent of this window
• Focus(): directs focus to the window

The final two methods are mainly just proofs of concept. Other methods could be added, but I didn't want to go overboard with something I don't know if anyone will use. Likewise, I'm sure there are other properties that could be useful. I'd love to hear more about them!

The window title can change over the window's lifetime. The title attribute tries to fetch the most recent window title whenever it's accessed, but if it can't (like if the window has been closed and no longer exists) it returns the last known title.

You can install this plugin and activate it like any other. If you've used the standard Task Monitor plugin, the behaviour is identical, except that the events produced start with TaskMonitorPlus. instead of Task..

In case you aren't familiar with the standard Task Monitor plugin, here's how you can use it: at the bottom of the EventGhost window, uncheck the checkbox that says "Log only assigned and activated events", then open or switch to a window which you'd like to take action on. You'll see an entry appear in the log that looks something like this:

TaskMonitorPlus.NewWindow.notepad <title='Untitled - Notepad', window_class='Notepad',...>

You can drag this entry from the log into any macro you've created, to cause the actions in that macro to be played back the next time that action takes place.

You can access the payload object from follow-on actions via the eg.event.payload object. For a simple example, to flash an on-screen display of the current window's title when Notepad opens, you could add the the EventGhost → Show OSD action to a macro, and enter something like "New window opened: {eg.event.payload.title}" in the "Text to display" field.

For more information on using EventGhost, consult the EventGhost website, wiki, and forums.

Official releases of this plugin are being made available at this thread on the EventGhost forums. You can also provide feedback and request support there.

I also accept issues and pull requests from the official GitHub repo for this project, Boolean263/EventGhost-TaskMonitorPlus. However, remember that this is not originally my work. If you experience problems with Task Monitor Plus, please check if the problem also happens when you use the original Task Monitor plugin.

Boolean263, aka David Perry, based on work by Bitmonster and blackwind

The original, canonical Task Monitor ships with EventGhost. This version is based on version 1.0.4 of that plugin (which was copied from the 0.5.0-rc4 release of EventGhost) and modified, based on ideas I had in (and feedback I received on) my EventGhost-WindowWatcher plugin.

The TaskHook.dll that comes with this add-on is also taken directly from EventGhost 0.5.0-rc4. The source code comes from the EventGhost/Extensions repo on github; the latest commit at the time I copied it was e031339. I have not made any changes to the DLL source or binary as of this writing.

• Bugfix: this plugin was breaking the event log if it tried to report a window that had non-ASCII characters in its title. I don't know if this is a bug in EventGhost itself or what, but I fixed it by using repr() to return the window title.

• Initial release of the Plus version of this plugin