You've been running dev servers by opening a terminal, typing a command, and hoping nothing crashes silently in the background. Donk replaces that with a single dashboard.
You're working on a project that needs a FastAPI backend, a Next.js frontend, and a background worker. Three terminals. You minimize one, forget which is which, come back twenty minutes later and one of them has silently crashed. You don't notice until you hit a 502 and lose your train of thought debugging the wrong thing.
Donk puts everything in one place. Every server in a single table — name, framework, status, CPU, memory, GPU usage, address. Green dot means running. Red means crashed. Amber means starting. You see the state of your entire development environment in one glance.
Start a server. Stop it. Restart it. One click each. No terminal, no command to remember, no flag to look up. The debug console below the server list shows real-time output — errors in red, warnings in amber, your output in white. HTTP access logs go to a separate Request Log tab so they don't drown your debug output.
When you're not actively looking at Donk, it sits in the system tray. Your servers keep running. Click the tray icon and you're back immediately. It starts with Windows if you want it to — your dev environment is live before you open VS Code.
Video: 30–40 second walkthrough of the dashboard — starting servers, reading stats, navigating the debug console.