Is there a way to list—and kill—running processes on Mac OS X in a Windows “Ctrl+Alt+Delete”-like way?

Based on your desire to kill an individual process, I'm assuming that you are ok with a solution at the Terminal. The Terminal is pretty light so should be responsive even if your system is swamped, or if you're logging in via ssh.

Beyond the basic kill command, which kills processes via their pid (which you'd need to get from either a ps command, or the Activity monitor), a neat trick at the terminal is the killall command, which allows you to kill a process by name rather than pid.

For example, if you know the name of your process is my-prog-0 or whatever, you can go to the terminal and do:

% killall my-prog-0

There are a number of good options (see man killall for more info):

-s : Shows the kill commands that will be generated so you can be safe.
-u : Limits to a specified user

One thing to note about OS X is that some system processes will be automatically restarted if they are killed by the launchd daemon (I think??). For example, if the Dock is not responsive you can do a killall Dock and it will restart automatically.

Force Quit is the alternative to Task Manager on Mac. It's fast, efficient, and kills applications really fast.

You can access this feature through two ways.

1.  Apple Icon (on the top left corner of the screen)--> Force Quit...
2. Hold Alt/Option +  Apple/Command + Escape. This can be useful if you memorised the keyboard command and in the rare case that Finder misbehaves and freezes along it too.

Try the following command in terminal to list and search for process using a regex:

ps gx | grep 'Symantec'

The above example is to list all the Symantec related processes. Replace 'Symantec' with your own phrase. Next use variations of kill command. You can either use:

kill pid

Replace pid with actual process id (the first number of a line in the output from above). Or use,

killall

as suggested before. To reiterate another useful suggestion, use

man kill 

to see the manual for the kill command and also scroll down and see related commands which is mentioned under the SEE ALSO section.