How does macOS get “pretty” hostnames in Network view

finderNetwork

In computer networking, "hostnames" are limited to alphanumeric characters, with dashes (no whitespace or other punctuation).

However, when I open the "Network" in Finder…

Finder - Locations - Network

I can see some devices (usually macOS) show up with spaces, punctuation, and UTF-8 characters in the name:

Network devices. MacBook has spaces

Ultimately, I'm looking to have the Raspberry Pi on my network show up with a pretty name. However, in my searching on how to do this, I'm finding I'm not even clear on how macOS gets these pretty names to show up. Searching for this yields too many results of articles explaining to people how to change the hostname of their mac, which I don't need help with.

On my Raspberry Pi, I can run hostnamectl and set the "pretty" name, but that doesn't seem to affect anything.

Anyone know how this is achieved?

Best Answer

I think that macOS uses the command line program arp to scan the devices on the local network

Enter arp -a in the terminal

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