zlacker

>>tobr+(OP)
One of my ideas is for application windows to have a button to flip to the internals of the application - see threads, connections, progress bars, concurrent loops, memory allocations, even stacks. This is what I call an encyclopedic desktop.

>>samsqu+wv4
I'm of the understanding it's actually possible to get 99% of exactly what you're describing if you're prepared to (learn how to) poke around with and squint at debugger-style tooling. Progress bars might be a bit tricky, but threads and connections are fair game, and tracing different kinds of loops is even viable too.

When I get back into the game with Windows again, I'll be seriously looking into ETW, Event Tracing for Windows.

It seems the best startpoint to learn about ETW is https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2015/09/01/xperf-basics-re... and https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2015/09/24/etw-central/.

The 2nd link above has a bunch of links to other pages, but is a few years old, so while the old info is still relevant, a quick poke around this blog's tags finds the following additional, newer posts that also demonstrate real-world insights of ETW saving the day in a bunch of practical situations:

https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2017/07/09/24-core-cpu-and...

https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2019/10/20/63-cores-blocke...

https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2019/12/08/on2-again-now-i...

https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2021/02/16/arranging-invis...

https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2021/07/25/finding-windows...