What the NotchStar Ports list shows
To see which program is listening on a port, open the Disk tab, pick Monitor and then Ports. NotchStar lists every TCP port in the listening state, with the process behind it and the project folder it was started from. It reads this from the Mac’s own lsof and ps tools.
What each row shows
| Part | Meaning |
|---|---|
:3000 | The port number |
| Bold name | The project folder, or the process name if no folder is known |
| Grey line | The command, shortened, such as next dev -p 3000 |
| Path | The working directory of the process, with your home folder shown as ~. If it is unknown, the process ID is shown |
| local or network | local means reachable only from this Mac. network (in orange) means other devices can reach it |
| Icons and Stop | Open in browser, show project in Finder, and a Stop button |
How the project is found
NotchStar reads the working directory of the process. It then walks up to six folders, looking for a marker such as .git, package.json, Package.swift, Cargo.toml, pyproject.toml, go.mod, Gemfile, pom.xml, build.gradle or docker-compose.yml, and stops at your home folder. The folder with the marker names the project. With none found, the working directory’s own name is used.
Local or network
An address of 127.0.0.1 or ::1 counts as local. Anything else, such as * for every interface, counts as network. That is worth a look: a dev server that says network can be reached by other devices on the same WiFi.
Header and filter
The header counts the ports, for example 7 listening, 5 local. Type in the filter box to narrow by port, process, project, command or folder.
The list refreshes about every 9 seconds while Ports is open. For the buttons, read Open and Stop. The whole tab is on the Disk feature page.
