GUIDE
Codex notifications on your Mac
To know the moment a Codex session finishes or stalls, you need something watching outside the terminal - because a Codex run buried in a background tab will happily sit done, or waiting, for an hour while you work on something else.
Why the terminal alone won’t tell you
Codex runs in a terminal tab, and a terminal tab is silent by design. If it’s behind another window or on a second monitor, a finished run and a stalled one look identical: nothing moving. You end up checking it every few minutes, which is the exact interruption an agent was supposed to remove.
What NapCat notices, without a plugin
NapCat recognizes Codex among 27+ coding agents by reading your Mac’s running processes - locally and read-only, nothing to install into Codex itself. From that it can tell the two states that matter:
- Working - the Codex process (or its subprocesses) is burning CPU. The notch shows a blue Working… bar so you can see it’s alive.
- Finished - activity drops off. NapCat plays a soft chime and surfaces the row, so a long run announces itself instead of waiting to be discovered.
The notch and the sounds
When a Codex session changes state, the Dynamic Island-style panel opens by itself and the session’s row moves to the top: what it was doing, which terminal it’s in, and how long it ran. A quiet sound marks the finish so you can stay heads-down in another app and still catch it. Click the row and NapCat brings that exact terminal tab forward in Terminal, iTerm2 or Warp - no hunting through windows for the run that pinged you.
An honest line on what’s Claude-specific
Two NapCat features are tied to Claude Code today, because they lean on Claude Code’s hooks: the Allow/Deny permission approvals in the notch, and the usage meter. Codex notifications here are the activity-based kind - finished and working, detected from the process, not a permission-prompt approval you can answer from the menu bar. We’d rather say so than imply Codex gets a button it doesn’t.
Everything Codex does get - live monitoring, jump-to-tab, notifications and the nap overlay - is on the Codex page. If you also run Claude Code, its notifications go a step further in Claude Code notifications, and long unattended runs are covered in run Claude Code overnight.
Questions
Does NapCat notify me the instant Codex finishes?
It fires within a few seconds. NapCat samples the process list on a short interval, so when a Codex run's activity drops off it chimes and opens the notch almost immediately - fast enough to switch back before you've lost the thread.
Do I have to configure anything inside Codex?
No. Recognition is by process, so a Codex session appears the moment it starts. There's no plugin, hook or config file to add to Codex - NapCat just reads that the process is running.
Can I approve a Codex permission prompt from the notch?
Not today. The approval buttons are Claude Code specific because they use Claude Code's PermissionRequest hook. For Codex you get finish-and-working notifications and one-click return to its exact Desktop thread or terminal.
Will Codex notifications wake my Mac or send data anywhere?
No session content leaves the Mac. Notifications are the menu-bar app reacting to local processes. Optional product analytics contains event metadata only and is off by default.
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