The New FavTray: A Mac Developer Dashboard

Short answer: the new FavTray is a native Mac developer dashboard that lives in the menu bar. Its developer cockpit shows what needs you right now (an agent waiting for approval, an AI limit about to run out, red CI, a dev server that stopped answering) and puts the fix one click away. Behind it is a real Mac window with a screen for every tool, including a GitHub Today view, project boards and local notes. It’s free to start, $4.99 once for everything, and no FavTray server stores your data.

Written for FavTray 2.0, released 28 September 2026. Prices of other apps were checked on 26 September 2026; if something has changed, email us and we’ll fix it.

Download FavTray: every tool unlocked for 7 days, no card. The download page asks for your email; the app itself needs no account.

What changed: from a menu of tools to a Mac developer dashboard

The new FavTray swaps a menu of tools for a dashboard of what needs you. In the old FavTray, clicking the icon opened a 480-point deck of tiles, you picked a tool, and settings lived in a split view nested inside a window. It worked, but you did all the looking. Now one click opens a 960-point cockpit that ranks what’s waiting on you, and every tool gets its own screen in a real Mac window.

• A 960-point cockpit popover, twice the width of the old one. One click on the menu bar icon shows eight modules and a ranked rail of things waiting on you.
• A real Mac window. A sidebar lists every tool, and each tool gets a full screen instead of a tile. The sidebar collapses to an icon rail you reorder by dragging. Settings live in the same window.
• A Home screen you arrange. A card grid with an edit mode and per-card sizes, a Dashboard | Chat switch, and a morning brief.
• Onboarding that asks for less. Up to seven steps, and it only requests the macOS permissions the tools you picked actually need.
• New tools. Projects, Notes, Space (the old disk view, now a full tool), Side Dock as a tool of its own, Flow AI, and a rebuilt Cloud Costs.
• New names. Windows is now Snap, Cloud is Cloud Costs, Move is Posture, and Disk is Space.
• A new look. Figtree type, a color for each tool, hover cards on every chart, and notifications that carry their own tool’s color and icon, so you can tell a CI failure from a water reminder without reading it.

What didn’t change

FavTray is still a native Swift app for macOS 14 Sonoma and later, and it still needs no account. Pro is still the one-time $4.99 Lifetime license introduced in 1.13.0, with no subscription. And it’s signed (since version 1.12.0, released 14 September 2026; see the changelog), so it opens like any other Mac app.

What is a Mac developer dashboard, and what should it do?

A Mac developer dashboard is one native app that watches what a developer would otherwise check by hand (AI coding limits, GitHub PRs and CI, localhost ports and dev servers, the Mac itself) and tells you when one of them needs you. It should stay quiet the rest of the time and keep your data on your Mac.

Most developer menu bars grow one problem at a time: an AI usage meter, a system monitor, a window snapper, a GitHub notifier, a port killer, a keep-awake toggle. Each one is fine. Together they’re ten icons, ten update channels and a pile of permission prompts. Before rebuilding FavTray, we wrote down the jobs instead of the apps:

1. Know what’s waiting on you without opening five apps. That’s the cockpit.
2. See AI limits before you hit them, across every plan you pay for. That’s AI Usage.
3. Know which process owns each localhost port, and whether it’s healthy. That’s Ports and the cockpit’s Dev servers module.
4. CI and reviews on your own pushes, not an inbox of every notification on every repo. That’s the GitHub Dashboard.
5. Plans and notes next to the code, in files you own. That’s Projects and Notes.
6. Stay quiet. Fetch while you’re looking and back off when you’re not.
7. Keep your data on your Mac. Covered in the privacy section below.

The rest of this post takes those jobs in order, then compares FavTray with the apps developers use for each one today. If you’d rather read app-by-app roundups, see our guides to the best Mac menu bar apps for developers and the best Mac developer tools for the menu bar.

The developer cockpit: everything that needs you, one click from the menu bar

FavTray’s developer cockpit is a 960-point popover that opens from the menu bar icon and answers one question: is anything waiting on me? It ranks what needs you across the top, shows eight modules below, and puts each fix one click away.

The “Needs you now” rail

Across the top, a rail ranks up to eight kinds of trouble, most urgent first. Each card carries its own fix, so you act from the card instead of going to find the right app:

1. An agent needs you. Approve or Deny right there.
2. An AI limit is at risk. See which window and when it runs out.
3. CI is red. Open the failing check.
4. A dev server or container is down. Kill or restart it.
5. A review has waited a day or more. Jump to the PR.
6. Your PR is blocked by conflicts or unresolved threads.
7. You have unpushed work sitting in a local checkout.
8. The Mac or disk is in trouble.

Eight modules

Below the rail sit eight modules:

• AI limits, the large card: up to five providers, with each window shown under the provider’s own name (Cursor’s Plan, Auto and API; Codex’s 5-hour and 7-day).
• Agents: running Claude Code and Codex sessions, with Approve and Deny always in reach.
• CI & PRs: Pushes, Reviews, Mine and Mentions, with PR size, mergeable state and unresolved threads.
• Dev servers and Docker containers.
• This Mac: CPU and memory with the last hour, memory pressure, swap and the top five processes. Quit and Kill ask first for anything that isn’t a dev process.
• Local work: checkouts with uncommitted or unpushed changes. It’s read-only and never pushes anything.
• AI spend: a 7-day chart.
• Disk: a free-space bar.

Click a module’s header and it opens that tool’s full pane in place (Back, Esc or ⌘[ returns). An outage strip appears only when one of your AI providers is having a bad day. The footer holds Join for a meeting starting within 10 minutes, the Keep Alive switch and your break toggles.

Built to stay quiet

Each module draws its last snapshot the moment the popover opens, then refreshes. Data sources start when the popover opens and stop when it closes. Dev-server health checks run every 30 seconds, but only while the cockpit is on screen, and port scans run off the main thread so the popover never stutters.

The cockpit is free on every install. Approving agents from it is part of Pro.

Can you approve Claude Code from the Mac menu bar?

Yes. FavTray’s Claude Code bridge connects to Claude Code’s PermissionRequest hook over a local unix socket. When Claude asks to run a command or edit a file, the request shows up in the notch island (FavShelf, FavTray’s Dynamic Island for the Mac notch), in the cockpit’s Agents module and at the top of the Needs-you rail. Approve or Deny from whichever is closest, and the answer goes straight back to the waiting session. If you don’t answer within 55 seconds, FavTray doesn’t guess: the request falls back to Claude Code’s own terminal prompt. The request and your answer stay on your Mac.

The Agents page watches Claude Code and Codex sessions, so you can see which ones are working, which are idle and which are waiting on you. Approvals and the Agents page are part of Pro; agent sounds are free.

What it doesn’t do yet: Gemini and Cursor agents aren’t monitored.

More detail: monitor and approve Claude Code from the notch, and the Dynamic Island for Mac it lives in.

A GitHub dashboard for Mac that needs no new token

FavTray’s GitHub Dashboard shows what happened in each of your repos Today, Yesterday or This week. Its local half needs no token and no network. Its PR and CI half reuses the gh CLI or git credentials already on your Mac, so you only paste a token if neither is set up.

The GitHub screen has six tabs: Dashboard, Inbox, My PRs, Watching, On disk and Manage. The Dashboard is the new part. For each repo it shows:

• commits (count, authors, times and messages), branches and unpushed work
• PRs opened, merged and reviewed, reviews waiting on you, and CI on your latest pushes
• totals and an hourly strip, a Mine/Everyone switch, and quiet repos folded out of the way

Every number says where it came from, which matters because the Dashboard has two halves.

The local half: a read-only git scanner

The first half needs no token and no network. It reads the checkouts on your disk with plain git, adds --no-optional-locks so it never fights your own git commands, and refuses any git subcommand that can write. Remote URLs are reduced to host/owner/repo before they’re stored, so a token embedded in a remote URL can’t leak into FavTray’s data. The scanner runs only while the Dashboard or the cockpit is on screen.

The GitHub half: one batched query

The second half fetches PRs, reviews and CI with a single batched GraphQL query (measured on our own account in September 2026: 34 repos in one query cost 1 point of GitHub’s 5,000-point hourly GraphQL rate limit). It runs at most every 5 minutes, only while the Dashboard or the cockpit is open, and backs off on 403 and 429 responses.

For credentials, the Manage tab reuses the gh CLI or your git credentials read-only, or you paste a token. It handles multiple accounts and GitHub Enterprise hosts, lists repos by owner with an “only repos I committed to this month” filter, and sets alerts with sounds per event, quiet hours and a live view of your refresh budget. The Inbox checks for new notifications every 15 minutes by default (1, 5 or 30 if you prefer) and refreshes when you open it.

Plan: Free watches 2 repos, and Pro watches every repo. Limits: it’s PR-focused (Mentions shows PRs only), it can’t re-run CI, it doesn’t track issues, and it’s GitHub only. More: GitHub notifications in the Mac menu bar.

AI limits and spend for Claude, Codex, Cursor and 27 more providers

FavTray’s AI Usage tool shows usage limits, pace and time to limit for 30 AI providers, including Claude, Codex, Cursor, Gemini, Copilot and Windsurf. It reads the logins already on your Mac, read-only. FavTray never refreshes or writes back your Claude, Codex, Cursor or Gemini credentials, so it can’t knock your CLI out of its session. Browser-cookie import is gone. API-key providers (z.ai/GLM, OpenAI and Anthropic admin keys, DeepSeek, Moonshot, xAI) are stored in FavTray’s own keychain item.

New in this release: Windsurf, Grok, CodeRabbit, Codebuff and the API-key providers above. Cursor now reads its login from cursor-agent or Cursor.app, and Antigravity’s quota is read locally from its running language server. When FavTray sees a supported tool running, it turns that provider on for you.

Each provider gets its own screen:

• limits with pace and time to limit (“hits limit 16:40”)
• a credits and balance chart
• utilization history, spend by model and a daily log
• a year-long heatmap
• an outage line from the provider’s status page
• alerts at 80%, 95% and limit hit, plus one “needs sign-in” notice per broken login
• CSV export

Cost from local logs

For Claude and Codex, FavTray also works out cost from the logs on your disk: Claude Code, Claude Desktop’s Cowork and local-agent logs, and Codex sessions, including archived ones and subagent threads that earlier versions missed. Models without a published price show “Partial”, never $0. Local-log cost covers Claude and Codex only.

Refresh that stays out of the way

In the background, AI Usage refreshes every 15 minutes by default (30 minutes or an hour if you prefer), and Low Power Mode doubles that. Earlier builds refreshed every 5 minutes while you were coding, which cost real CPU on slower Macs, so nothing speeds up background refresh any more. Instead, opening AI Usage or the cockpit refreshes anything older than 5 minutes, so what you look at is current. It honors Retry-After and keeps the last good numbers through a failed refresh instead of blanking the screen.

Plan: AI Usage is free, history included.

If you track more than a handful of providers, CodexBar covers more of them and has a CLI; FavTray’s case is putting your limits next to everything else you watch. For the wider field, see our roundup of AI usage tracking tools. More: AI usage tracker, Claude Code pricing: Pro vs Max vs API, how to reduce Claude Code token usage and FavTray vs Helicone.

Which process owns each localhost port, and is it healthy?

Ports lists every listening port with the real app or tool behind it and one of about 200 developer-tool logos. Python and Node servers show their project name instead of “python3” or “node”. Each port is one row even when a reloader and its worker both hold it, and Kill acts on every PID behind it. Process history shows what held a port before. Ports is free for 10 kills a day, and kills from the cockpit and the notch count too. Pro is unlimited and adds threshold alerts.

The cockpit’s Dev servers module adds context. Each server shows its project and branch, a 1-hour CPU sparkline and a health check (a HEAD request: Slow after one miss, Down after two). Docker containers come from the local Docker socket, with Restart and Stop behind a confirm. Agents and MCP servers that run as node always ask before a kill, so you don’t take down Claude Code by accident. It doesn’t show container logs.

System and processes

System shows live CPU, memory and volume. Click any process to see its CPU and memory over 1 hour to 30 days, every run it’s had, and the app’s total. Versioned process names are joined, so a process called “2.1.281” shows up as Claude Code. The core is free; resource and battery alerts are part of Pro.

Space: where your disk went

Space has four views: Overview, Map (a treemap), Cleanup and Big files. APFS clones count once and cloud-only files count as zero, so the totals match what’s actually on disk. Space never deletes, moves or changes a file. Each row can only reveal in Finder, copy its path, or open the app that owns the files. Space is part of Pro.

More: kill a process by port, how to kill a port on Mac, Mac system monitor, Stats vs iStat Menus vs FavTray and FavTray vs iStat Menus.

A local project tracker and Notion-style notes for your Mac

FavTray Projects is a local project tracker and FavTray Notes is a Notion-style notes app, both inside the FavTray window. Every board and every page is a JSON file under ~/.config/FavTray/, so there’s no account and no sync, and the files are the export. A free install creates up to 2 project boards and 2 notes, Pro is unlimited, and anything already created stays usable.

Projects

Projects gives each board three views: Table, Board (kanban with drag, WIP limits, group-by and roll-ups) and Roadmap. Items have six field types, sub-items and a text filter syntax, and there’s a Trash for anything you delete. Start from one of seven templates or an empty board.

• Due dates arrive as one daily digest at an hour you pick, never one notification per item.
• Quick capture is a global hotkey that opens a small panel without switching apps. It understands #board !p0 >status, so a task lands on the right board with its priority and status set as you type it.
• Storage is one JSON file per board in ~/.config/FavTray/Projects. Edits made outside FavTray are picked up, and saves are atomic.
• Projects AI proposes items you review in an editable sheet. Nothing is written until you confirm.

Plan: Free creates up to 2 boards, and every board FavTray made on your Mac keeps opening and saving; a board file copied in past the allowance opens read-only. Pro is unlimited. Projects AI works through Flow AI, so on Free it counts toward the 10 asks a day.

Notes

Notes are nested pages, one JSON file each in ~/.config/FavTray/Notes. Blocks cover headings, lists, checklists, toggles, callouts, code, typed tables with sorting, card grids, and two- or three-column layouts. Type ”/” for the block menu, use Markdown shortcuts as you type, and drag blocks in and out of columns. Pages get emoji icons, full-text search, and a Standard, Wide or Full width setting each.

Plan: Free creates up to 2 notes (the Welcome page doesn’t count), and every page FavTray made on your Mac keeps opening and saving; a page copied in past the allowance opens read-only. Pro is unlimited.

What they don’t do yet: no sync, no collaboration, no image blocks, and no calendar or gallery views. The files on disk are the export. Why we build this way: local-first software on the Mac.

Track Google Cloud and AWS spend without opening the console

FavTray Cloud Costs puts your Google Cloud and AWS spend in the FavTray window: Google Cloud from your BigQuery billing export, AWS from Cost Explorer.

Google Cloud: Cloud Costs reads your BigQuery billing export, with every query capped at 100 MB billed, and refreshes every 6 hours or when you ask. It shows cost minus credits in your billing currency, compares it with the same days last month, and adds a forecast clearly labeled as FavTray’s own. There’s a daily chart by service, top SKUs, your budgets, and savings suggestions from Google’s Recommender (FavTray never switches that API on for you).

AWS: Cost Explorer, opt-in, capped at 12 requests a day because AWS charges $0.01 per Cost Explorer API request (AWS pricing).

Your gcloud token is held in memory only. Plan: Free connects 1 cloud account, AWS or Google Cloud, and Pro connects them all. Limits: Google Cloud needs the BigQuery billing export turned on and a signed-in gcloud, and there’s no Azure. More: AWS and GCP cost tracker.

Ask questions about your own data with your own AI, or a local model

Flow AI is FavTray’s bring-your-own-model assistant for questions about your own data. It adds an Ask drawer to every tool screen (⌘/), and Home’s Chat view asks across tools, for questions like “which PRs are waiting on my review?” or “what’s holding port 5173?”. It works through read-only tools over AI Usage, GitHub, Meetings, Ports, Space, System and Projects.

You bring the model: OpenAI, DeepSeek, OpenRouter, Groq, Together, Mistral, Fireworks, a custom endpoint, or Ollama and LM Studio running locally. Requests go only to the provider you configure; there’s no FavTray AI server in between. You tick a checkbox for each data area it may read, secrets are scrubbed before anything is sent, and the actions it can suggest are limited to navigating and read-only refreshes.

The morning brief on Home has two parts: its rows are computed on your Mac and need no key, and the written summary uses Flow AI. Plan: connecting a provider is free, and Free gets 10 answers a day, shared by the Ask drawer and Home chat. The brief doesn’t count toward them, and Pro is unlimited.

What carried over, and got better

• Eye Rest is still free. It gains a Night Shift switch (in Eye Rest and in Settings), and the pre-break notice now shows over fullscreen apps. Body breaks are part of Pro. Background reading: the 20-20-20 rule and FavTray vs Time Out.
• Reminders are full-screen reminders you answer. New: a Month, Week and Day calendar drawn from what actually fired and what’s scheduled, 30- and 90-day adherence with streaks, and 400 days of history. Free keeps 3 active reminders; Pro is unlimited.
• Meetings adds a month calendar, booked hours and time per person, and the 1-minute warning shows over fullscreen apps. Free gets the full-screen alert for 4 meetings a day, then a normal banner with Join; Pro is unlimited. See also meeting reminder apps for Mac.
• Side Dock (Hydrate, Posture) now has a live preview you drag to reorder. Hydrate and Posture are free for 10 logs a day each; unlimited logs, their history and 10 more dock modules are part of Pro.
• Max, the desk buddy, has 41 animation clips and 10 stories. Pick him up and drop him somewhere else, and let him roam along the Dock or across the screen. Pro.
• Snap covers halves, quarters, thirds, two-thirds, maximize and center. Free snaps to thirds and two-thirds 20 times a day, and everything else is unlimited. See Rectangle vs FavTray.
• Screenshot: ⌘⇧7 to capture and annotate. Free copies or saves 10 captures a day; Pro is unlimited.
• AI Writer, the floating writing toolbar, is now open to every install and runs on your own AI provider. Free gets 10 rewrites a day; Pro is unlimited.
• Keep Alive gets its own screen in the window. Free runs 3 hours a day and shows the end time when you start; Pro is unlimited. Compare it with other keep-alive apps and Amphetamine.
• Menu Bar is free. It reorders your menu bar icons, with faster icon loading, and Collapse all hides your apps from the bar until Open all brings them back. It’s tested on macOS 14–26. It can’t hide icons one by one; if you need that, see ways to hide and reorder menu bar icons.
• FavShelf, the notch island, keeps its free glance (media, weather, AI usage bars); the tools inside and Claude Code approvals are part of Pro. More: Dynamic Island apps for Mac and FavTray vs Notchy.

The notch island, a live recreation from the previous version. In the new FavTray, agent approvals appear here too.

Hydrate on the Side Dock, a live recreation from the previous version.

How does FavTray compare with single-purpose Mac apps?

Many of these apps are free and open source, and several are better at their one job than FavTray is. FavTray’s case is one native app, one set of permissions, one update and one $4.99 license instead of ten installs. Each row below names where the other apps are stronger. Features and prices come from each app’s own website, docs or repository (sources are listed under the cost breakdown), checked on 26 September 2026. We haven’t benchmarked the apps side by side.

What the separate stack costs

If you buy one paid pick for each row that has one, the one-time purchases add up to about $120: Usagebar $9, PortBar €7.50 (about $9), iStat Menus $11.99, Tot’s $19.99 Mac unlock, Rectangle Pro $9.99, CleanShot X $35 and Bartender 7 $24.99. The common subscriptions come to about $135 a year: Bartender Pro $19.99 (instead of buying Bartender 7), CleanShot’s $19 update plan and Raycast Pro at $96. FavTray is $4.99 once.

Sources for the prices and features above: CodexBar, ccusage, SessionWatcher, Usagebar, Gitify, iStat Menus, Stats, Tot, Notion, Stretchly, Rectangle Pro, Magnet, CleanShot X, Bartender, Ice releases and Raycast.

That comparison is only fair if we say the other half: free, open-source apps exist for most of these rows, and plenty of developers run them happily. More on that trade-off: developer subscription fatigue and why one app instead of ten.

When a separate app is the better choice

• You track more AI providers than FavTray’s 30, or need a CLI or widgets: CodexBar or ccusage.
• You need to hide some menu bar icons and keep others: Bartender. (Ice is free, but its last stable release was October 2024.)
• You need screen recording, scrolling capture or OCR: CleanShot X. See CleanShot X alternatives.
• You need fan control and sensors: iStat Menus or Stats.
• You use GitLab, Gitea or Bitbucket: Gitify.
• You want notes synced to your phone or shared with a team: Apple Notes, Tot or Notion.
• You want window throw, workspaces or iCloud sync: Rectangle Pro. See window managers for Mac.
• You also work on Windows or Linux: Stretchly and other cross-platform apps.

We’d rather you pick the right tool than pick us and churn. Our FavTray alternatives post covers the notch apps, and the menu bar clutter guide covers the general problem.

What stays on your Mac, and what talks to the network?

Stays local: Projects, Notes, reminder logs and usage history are files on your Mac. Space never changes a file. Cloud tokens are held in memory only.

Read-only: FavTray reuses your AI and GitHub logins read-only, and every git command it runs is read-only.

Talks to the network, in full:

• the AI providers you use, to read your limits
• GitHub
• provider status pages
• weather, for the notch
• Google Cloud (BigQuery) and AWS Cost Explorer, only if you set up Cloud Costs
• the license check
• update checks
• FavTray’s own server, once, to download Max’s animation files on licensed installs
• Flow AI, which goes to your provider or a local model

So the accurate claim is this: no FavTray server stores your data. More: local-first software, privacy-first Mac apps and our privacy policy.

What’s free, what’s $4.99, and what FavTray doesn’t do yet

Free works forever with no account, and every tool opens on it: some with no limit, some with a daily limit that resets at midnight on your Mac, and some with a cap on how many you add. Nothing you already set up is ever removed. Pro is a one-time $4.99 Lifetime license for one Mac that removes every limit, and a Lifetime license keeps working offline without expiring. Every install gets Pro free for 7 days, with no limits and no card. Prices are in USD.

Free vs Pro, tool by tool

Tool	Free	Pro ($4.99 once)
Developer cockpit, AI Usage with history, System, Eye Rest	No limit	No limit
Menu Bar, FavShelf glance, agent sounds	No limit	No limit
Hydrate and Posture	10 logs a day each	Unlimited, with history
Ports	10 kills a day, cockpit and notch kills included	Unlimited, plus threshold alerts
Snap	Halves, quarters, maximize and center unlimited; thirds 20 a day	Unlimited
AI Writer	10 rewrites a day, on your own AI provider	Unlimited
Flow AI	10 asks a day; the Home brief doesn’t count	Unlimited
Screenshot	10 captures a day	Unlimited
Keep Alive	3 hours a day	Unlimited
Meetings	Full-screen alert for 4 meetings a day, then a banner with Join	Unlimited
Notes and Projects	2 notes and 2 boards	Unlimited
Reminders	3 active	Unlimited
GitHub	2 watched repos	Every repo
Cloud Costs	1 account, AWS or Google Cloud	Every account
Space	—	Yes
Claude Code approvals and the Agents page	—	Yes
Body breaks, FavShelf tools, more dock modules, Max	—	Yes
System and battery alerts	—	Yes

What it doesn’t do yet

• No Linear or Jira tasks.
• No CI re-runs and no container logs.
• No Gemini or Cursor agent monitoring.
• No Azure in Cloud Costs.
• No sync, collaboration or images in Notes and Projects.
• Menu Bar can’t hide icons one by one.
• No AI Usage widgets.

FavTray needs macOS 14 Sonoma or later. Install help is in the install guide and getting started, and every change is in the changelog.

Download FavTray and try every tool free for 7 days, with no card. The download page asks for your email; the app itself needs no account.