LidAwake app icon: a white coffee cup on a brown gradient

LidAwake.

Keep your Mac awake with the lid closed. Your builds, downloads, and agent sessions survive. Brightness comes back exactly where you left it.

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/deezeddd/LidAwake-Mac/main/install.sh | bash
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LidAwake menu open in the macOS menu bar with the filled coffee cup icon and Keep Awake When Lid Is Closed checked
Filled cup = your Mac stays awake with the lid closed.

Why you'll like it

☕

One-click toggle

A coffee cup in the menu bar. Click to keep the Mac running lid-closed, click to go back to normal sleep.

🔆

Brightness memory

Saves your screen brightness when the lid closes and restores the exact level when you reopen.

🪶

Genuinely tiny

About 200 lines of native Swift. No Electron, no daemons, a few MB of RAM, no network access.

🔍

Fully auditable

The whole app is one readable source file, MIT licensed. The installer builds it on your own machine.

🚀

Start at Login

One menu item, using Apple's own login items API. Set it once and forget the app exists.

📜

Honest logging

Every lid and brightness event is logged locally, so you can always see exactly what it did.

How it works

  1. Sleep toggle: flips Apple's supported pmset disablesleep power flag through a sudoers rule scoped to exactly two commands. No kernel extensions, no hacks.
  2. Lid detection: macOS fires no display-sleep event on lid close; it disconnects the built-in display. LidAwake polls AppleClamshellState on IOPMrootDomain instead.
  3. Brightness: saved and restored via the DisplayServices framework, the same API used by MonitorControl.
⚠️ While the toggle is on, your Mac will not sleep at all, even on battery inside a bag. The filled cup is your reminder to switch it off before you pack up.