Dead Process Mate – a menu-bar app to kill leftover Node/dev processes

Dead Process Mate, a native macOS menu-bar app, lets developers kill leftover Node and dev processes in one click by reading the kernel directly. The app, built with Swift and requiring macOS 14+ on Apple Silicon, highlights orphaned, idle, and high-CPU processes to help AI-assisted coders manage server clutter. It is available via Homebrew or a DMG download, with ad-hoc signing and no network connections.

A tiny native macOS menu-bar app that keeps an eye on your Node/dev processes, shows which ports they hold, and helps you kill the leftover ones in one click. No Electron. No ps / lsof shelling out. Just a small Swift binary reading the kernel directly. Lives only in the menu bar — no Dock icon. When you code — especially with AI assistants — dev servers pile up fast. A vite here, a next dev there, three pnpm watchers, a script you Ctrl-C 'd that didn't actually die. They keep holding ports :3000 is “already in use” again , eating RAM, and spinning the fans. Dead Process Mate makes all of that visible in your menu bar and one click away from gone. It's especially good at spotting the dead leftovers : a dev server whose parent terminal is gone it got reparented to launchd , something that's been idle for hours, or a zombie — exactly the stuff that quietly wastes your machine. Process list — your dev processes with friendly names vite dev , next-server , npm run dev — not a wall of node , CPU %, memory, uptime, and the project folder each runs in. Search, sort, and group by project. Ports view — what's listening where, mapped to the owning process. Common dev ports 3000 , 5173 , 8080 , … are highlighted so the server you're looking for pops. Health at a glance — a colored dot per process see the table below , and a matching indicator right in the menu bar. One-click kill — hover any row → ✕. Graceful SIGTERM first, auto-escalates to SIGKILL after 3 s. Right-click for Force Kill and copy/reveal actions. “Kill N” in the footer clears every flagged process at once. Notifications — optional, throttled alerts for orphaned processes, idle servers still holding a port, memory hogs, and “too many idle Node processes piling up.” Every banner has a Kill button. Launch at login , pause monitoring, configurable thresholds, force-kill toggle. Everything is local — it never makes a network connection. Each process gets a status; the worst one bubbles up to the menu bar. Defaults are all editable in Settings → Thresholds . | Dot | Status | When | |---|---|---| | 🟢 | Healthy | running normally | | 🟡 | Idle / old | running ≥ 4 h, or idle <1% CPU for ≥ 30 min, or over the memory limit | | 🟠 | High CPU | ≥ 80% CPU sustained for ≥ 15 s | | 🔴 | Orphaned | parent process is gone reparented to launchd — a classic abandoned dev server | | 🔴 | Zombie | defunct process kill its parent | Precedence: zombie › orphaned › high-CPU › idle/old › healthy. All healthy → a calm monochrome icon choose CPU / activity pulse / gauge / stack in Settings . Something's wrong → the icon tints and a count of flagged processes appears next to it or a colored dot — your choice . So you can tell at a glance without opening the panel. Paused → a pause glyph. Requirements: macOS 14+ · Apple Silicon. brew install --cask --no-quarantine bartosk97/tap/dead-process-mate On Homebrew 6+ you'll be asked to trust the tap once — run the brew trust bartosk97/tap command it prints, then re-run the install. Grab the .dmg from the latest release https://github.com/BartosK97/dead-process-mate/releases/latest , drag the app to Applications, then clear the download quarantine and open it: xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/DeadProcessMate.app open /Applications/DeadProcessMate.app This build is ad-hoc signed, not notarized no paid Apple account yet , so macOS quarantines the download — that's what the --no-quarantine flag and the xattr command handle. Everything runs locally; the app makes no network calls. Needs the Swift toolchain from Xcode or the Command Line Tools xcode-select --install — a full Xcode install is not required. git clone https://github.com/BartosK97/dead-process-mate.git cd dead-process-mate ./build.sh run build + package + ad-hoc sign, then launch or ./build.sh build just build dist/DeadProcessMate.app ./build.sh install copy into /Applications and launch build.sh compiles with SwiftPM, assembles a DeadProcessMate.app bundle generating the icon from icon.png , and ad-hoc code-signs it. On Apple Silicon a signature is mandatory just to run, and notifications need a real bundle identity — the script handles both. Launch the via .app build.sh or open , not the bare binary in .build/ . Running the raw executable breaks notifications no bundle identity . macOS asks to allow notifications — click Allow or enable it later in System Settings › Notifications › Dead Process Mate . If you skip it, everything else still works; you just won't get banners. Click the menu-bar icon to open the panel. Processes tab — hover a row to reveal the ✕ kill button. Click a row to expand it PID/PPID, full command, folder, ports, copy/reveal . Right-click for a full menu Kill, Force Kill, Copy PID/command, Reveal in Finder . Ports tab — see every listening port and who owns it; hover → ✕ to free it. Footer — ⏸ pause/resume, Kill N kill everything flagged , ⚙ settings, ⏻ quit. Open with the ⚙ in the footer or ⌘, . Four tabs: General — menu-bar icon, warning indicator count / dot / none , refresh interval 2 / 5 / 10 / 30 s , launch at login. Thresholds — when a process turns yellow/orange/red and when it notifies: “old after N h”, “idle after N min”, high-CPU %, high-memory, and the “too many idle” count. Notifications — master toggle, per-event toggles, and a repeat throttle so you're never nagged about the same thing twice within the window. Watched — which process names to track node , vite , next-server , … , a show-all toggle, and a force-kill SIGKILL toggle off by default — graceful SIGTERM first is recommended . Processes — proc listpids + proc pidinfo PROC PIDTBSDINFO / PROC PIDTASKINFO for pid/ppid/start-time/RSS/CPU, proc pidpath + KERN PROCARGS2 for the full command line, and PROC PIDVNODEPATHINFO for the working directory. Zombies invisible to proc pidinfo are caught via a sysctl KERN PROC fallback. CPU % is derived by diffing cumulative CPU time between refreshes. Ports — each process's socket file descriptors are read via PROC PIDLISTFDS + PROC PIDFDSOCKETINFO , keeping only TCP sockets in LISTEN state — the same data lsof surfaces, without spawning it. UI — SwiftUI MenuBarExtra .window style , .accessory activation policy so there's no Dock icon. Notifications & launch-at-login — UserNotifications and ServiceManagement . A full scan of ~800 processes takes ~15 ms and runs off the main thread, so it's effectively free. Kills are guarded against PID reuse : a process's start-time signature is captured and re-checked before escalating to SIGKILL , so a recycled PID can't lead to killing the wrong process. All scanning is read-only kernel introspection of your own processes — no root, no privileged helper. Sources/ CSystemProbe/ C shim over libproc process + listening-socket scan DeadProcessMate/ App/ @main app, self-test hook Model/ data models, naming, preferences Core/ scanner, monitor, killer, notifications, login item Views/ menu-bar panel, rows, settings build.sh build + package + ad-hoc sign also builds the .icns Info.plist LSUIElement bundle metadata icon.png 1024×1024 app-icon source Run a headless scan handy for hacking on the scanner : DPM SELFTEST=1 ./dist/DeadProcessMate.app/Contents/MacOS/DeadProcessMate No notifications? They only work when the app runs from the .app bundle launched via open not the bare binary , and after you approve the prompt. Re-enable in System Settings › Notifications › Dead Process Mate. “app can't be opened” / it won't launch? Make sure it's signed — always launch through build.sh / open , not .build/release/DeadProcessMate . A process I care about isn't listed? Add its name in Settings → Watched, or turn on “Show all processes.” Issues and PRs welcome. It's a small, single-purpose app — keep it native, keep it light. swift build to compile, ./build.sh run to try it. MIT — see LICENSE /BartosK97/dead-process-mate/blob/main/LICENSE .