Awayke

Awayke is a small one-click macOS menubar utility that prevents your Mac from sleeping when the lid is closed

What it does

Single click in your menubar:

• Orange laptop icon - active: lid-close sleep, display sleep, and screen lock are all disabled. Close the lid and your agents keep running.
• White laptop icon - inactive: normal macOS sleep, display, and lock behavior restored.

Quitting Awayke always re-enables sleep automatically.

Install

Download (recommended):

1. Download the latest Awayke.app.zip from Releases.
2. Unzip, drag to /Applications.
3. Open it.
4. On first launch macOS will ask you to approve Awayke's background helper. Approve it once and toggling sleep is instant and silent from then on.

Awayke is not on the Mac App Store because App Store sandboxing blocks the system call it needs. This is the same reason tools like Lunar, TextExpander, and BetterTouchTool are distributed outside the App Store. Download directly from Releases, open, confirm, and you are good to go.

Or build from source:

git clone https://github.com/daemonphantom/Awayke.git
cd Awayke
open Awayke.xcodeproj

Requires Xcode 16+, macOS 13 Ventura or later.

Who it's for

You're running Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor on a long task. You want to close your laptop, walk to the next room, come back. You don't want to come back to a dead session.

If you've ever wedged something in your hinge to fake an external display, this is for you.

Is this dangerous?

The command Awayke uses is Apple's own tooling. Thermal risk for short hops, like walking between rooms or a bathroom break, is low. Apple Silicon throttles before anything damaging happens. Don't put your laptop in a bag with Awayke active. Keep it on AC. I cannot guarantee full safety though, so use this tool AT YOUR OWN RISK.

How it works

macOS has a separate sleep pathway for lid-close events — independent from the display sleep that most "keep awake" apps target. The only reliable override is pmset disablesleep, Apple's own system-level power management command.

Awayke wraps this in a single menubar toggle with no configuration surface.

A privileged SMAppService helper daemon, installed once on first run, executes the pmset calls as root over XPC. After the one-time approval, every toggle is instant and silent — including across reboots. If the user declines approval, Awayke falls back to running the command via osascript with admin privileges, which prompts for the password on each toggle.

Caveats

• pmset -a disablesleep is system-wide. While Awayke is active, nothing will sleep from a closed lid.
• macOS will still force sleep on critical battery regardless of disablesleep. Keep the laptop on AC.

Why this exists

Closing your lid to sleep your Mac is one of the best things about macOS and Awayke doesn't want to change that. It's an occasional override. Toggle on, close lid, walk to the next room, come back, toggle off.

	Awayke	Amphetamine	caffeinate
Lid-close sleep prevention	✅	✅ (buried 3 menus deep)	❌
One-click toggle	✅	❌	❌
No sudo prompt	✅	✅	❌
Nothing else	✅	❌ (feature-heavy)	—

Amphetamine is great. Awayke is for people who want exactly one thing, instantly.

License

MIT