[erlang-questions] observer process labels

[Motiejus Jakštys]

On Fri, Jun 28, 2013 at 2:55 AM, Paul Rubin <paul@REDACTED> wrote:
> I've been using observer to watch what's happening in my program as
> processes come and go.  It's great the way the little ovals on the
> applications tab show the supervision and worker structure, with the  name
> of each registered process shown in the oval.
>
> It isn't quite as nice when the process is unregistered, as happens with a
> bunch of my processes since they're created dynamically based on external
> events.  I do register some (maybe all) of those processes with gproc, but
> they can't each be on an atom since indeterminately many of them come and go
> during the program's operation.
>
> I'm wondering what people think of the idea of an observer patch that does
> one of the following:
>
> 2) look at a special entry in the process dictionary, something like
> {observer, label, "some string"}  (or arbitrary term instead of string) that
> gets displayed as the label.

I really like this idea. With easy way to extend observer (for
instance, like you mentioned, adding colors to ovals. Can be also
labels, shape of the figure, etc), this could be a great visualization
tool.

-- 
Motiejus Jakštys