Building Projax: A Developer's Project Dashboard

My ~/Developer folder is a mess. Twenty-five projects, half-finished ideas, experiments I forgot about. I'd spend five minutes just remembering which port a project runs on, or whether I'd committed my last changes.

I built projax to fix that.

The Problem

Between my work at ON24 and all the side projects I've accumulated since my Innovation Lab days, I have a lot of code on my machine. Each project has different:

Package managers (npm, pnpm, bun, cargo)
Scripts and commands
Dev server ports
Test setups
Git branches and uncommitted changes

I was constantly cd-ing around, grepping through package.json files, and forgetting which projects I hadn't touched in months.

One Core, Many Interfaces

I wanted to access this info from everywhere—terminal, editor, menubar. So I built projax as a monorepo:

text

projax/
├── packages/
│   ├── core/          # Project detection logic
│   ├── cli/           # Command-line interface
│   ├── prxi/          # Terminal UI
│   ├── api/           # REST API
│   ├── desktop/       # Electron app
│   └── vscode-extension/

The CLI

bash

projax list              # See all projects
projax info my-app       # Get details
projax run my-app dev    # Run scripts from anywhere
projax ports             # What's using which port?

The TUI

I built a terminal UI with Ink (React for the terminal). Arrow keys to navigate, enter to open, all the info at a glance.

The VS Code Extension

Same data, right in the sidebar. Works in Cursor and Windsurf too. Click to open projects, see git status, run scripts.

What It Detects

The core package scans directories and figures out:

typescript

interface Project {
  name: string;
  path: string;
  packageManager: 'npm' | 'pnpm' | 'bun' | 'cargo';
  scripts: Record<string, string>;
  ports: number[];
  hasTests: boolean;
  testFramework?: string;
  lastModified: Date;
  gitBranch?: string;
  gitStatus?: 'clean' | 'dirty';
}

The port detection alone has saved me hours. It parses package.json scripts, checks .env files, scans vite.config and next.config—figures out what runs where.

Lessons from Building CLI Tools

This isn't my first CLI. I built ace back at the Innovation Lab for bootstrapping React projects. A few things I've learned:

Monorepos are worth it — Sharing types between CLI, API, and extension saves so much time
Build for yourself — Projax solves my exact problems because I use it every day
Start with the CLI — It's the fastest to iterate on, then add GUI later

Try It