Activity Monitor is one of those essential applications that I use frequently. Activity Monitor has a five-category tabs at the top of the Activity Monitor window: CPU, Memory, Energy, Disk, Network, and Cache. Each of these main categories includes subcategories called columns.
Sometime you may realize that some or all of the columns items are disappeared. Does Activity Monitor not show any columns? If you are having this problem, this short article explains how you can bring back the column items in the Activity Monitor app.
Please try each step one at a time until you resolve your issue.
- Let us first state the obvious. As you probably know, you can add or remove columns by choosing View > Columns from the menu bar. Are columns selected? If not, select them and this will fix the issue.
- Still, columns are missing? We will delete the Activity Monitor app preferences. Here is how:
- First, quit the Activity Monitor app if it is running
- Go to the Finder of Mac OS
- Click the Go menu
- Click the Go To Folder menu (shurtcut: Command+Shift+G)
- This will open a window. In this window, enter the following command and click Go.
- ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.ActivityMonitor.plist
- This will open the Preferences window with com.apple.ActivityMonitor.plist selected.
- Delete this file by moving it to the Trash
- Now open Activity Monitor and check if columns are there.
See also: Mac Spotlight Search Not Working?
this works for awhile but then the columns slide all the way to the right.This is a bug and shame on apple for allowing it.
2nd method fixed the issue for me. Thanks.
Worked a treat, thank you!
It was important to use the ‘go to folder’, I wasn’t able to see it by navigating in finder in the usual way.
Fantastic; columns resumed!!
Brilliant – I had recently upgraded to Catalina – lost the activity monitor data. Removing the plist file and everything worked.
Yep. I just fixed it today for the second time. Maybe today’s Catalina update will fix it.
It works. Thank you.
I don’t know why it is happen on my mac with Catalina OS.
Thanks. Worked like a charm. I keep forgetting about the obvious option of deleting an app’s plist.
Thanks for this! Beauddy!
Thanks, It worked.
For a minute I thought they had removed the columns in Activity Monitor like they removed the columns in Mail for Catalina. Perhaps to stop people accidentally stopping some process that shouldn’t be stopped.
I was thinking next they are going to remove the columns in Finder. Then the ones in Numbers.
At that stage, I will be leaving the Apple ecosystem.
Yes, going through Finder and deleting the preferences file and restarting Activity Monitor fixed it for me.