Portctl

A simple and minimal plugin to inspect and terminate listening TCP/UDP ports from the bar.

Plugin

Field	Value
ID	rxtsel/portctl
Entries	Bar widget: indicator; panel: panel; service: scanner

Requirements

Install ss from iproute2 on PATH. Available on all major Linux distributions; install the iproute2 package if missing.

Usage

Add the indicator widget to a bar. It shows a plug icon with the count of active listening ports. The widget is hidden when no ports are detected. Click it to open the port panel.

Open the panel directly with:

noctalia msg panel-toggle rxtsel/portctl:panel

The panel lists listening ports grouped by category (Development, Databases, Containers, Servers, Cloud, Other). From there you can:

• Search by port number, process name, or PID.
• Toggle TCP and UDP visibility independently with the header toggles.
• Click any PID label to copy the PID to the clipboard.
• Kill a process: click × to stage the kill, then confirm with Kill in the inline confirmation row. The row transforms in place — no dialog opens.

To customize the bar icon, right-click the widget → settings → Glyph.

Settings

Setting	Type	Default	Description
refresh_interval	int	5	Seconds between automatic port scans (1–60).
ignore_list	string	(empty)	Comma-separated process name substrings to hide (e.g. discord,chrome,steam).
ignore_ports	string	(empty)	Comma-separated port numbers to hide (e.g. 37700,6463).
hide_system_ports	bool	true	Hide ports below 1024 (privileged/root ports).
hide_unknown_ports	bool	false	Hide ports whose process info is inaccessible (root-owned processes, rootlessport, etc.).

Widget settings (right-click widget → settings):

Setting	Type	Default	Description
glyph	glyph	plug	Icon shown in the bar.

Notes

Root-owned ports — ports owned by root-level processes show — as the PID and cannot be killed from the plugin (no privilege escalation is performed). Enable hide_unknown_ports to exclude them from the list.

Container ports with pasta networking — ports forwarded via pasta (the default network backend in Podman 4+) do not create a host-side socket and are not visible to ss. They will not appear in portctl. Ports forwarded via rootlessport (older Podman, or explicit --network slirp4netns) do appear, categorized under Containers.

rootlessport entries — expected behavior when running Podman or Docker in rootless mode with published ports (-p). Add rootlessport to ignore_list or the specific port number to ignore_ports to suppress them.

Processes spawned — ss -ltnp and ss -lunp on every scan. No network calls. No filesystem writes outside noctalia.pluginDataDir().