Processes in Activity Monitor with gray lettering Why are there some processes listed in Activity Monitor for applications that I've recently quit? They are displayed in light grey characters under the Energy tab, and the only column with data is the Avg Energy Impact column:



When I run ps ax | grep -i &lt;partial name of command&gt; nothing comes back (well, actually, it returns the grep I just executed, but that's not what I'm after). For what it's worth, I'm running 10.12.6.
Your screenshot is heavily cropped, but I presume you're on the Energy tab instead of CPU or Memory. The Energy tab shows recent applications (not all processes) and displays their Average Energy Impact. Simply being in the list on the Energy tab does not mean the application/process is running — the opposite in fact when looking at greyed out applications.