Vigil

Keep your Mac awake. On your terms.

A native macOS menu-bar app that prevents your Mac from sleeping — whether you're running a long export, watching something with the lid open, or stepping away from your closed laptop while a download finishes. No terminal commands. No browser tab tricks. Just a toggle.

 

Why Vigil

• 🔋 Won't run your battery flat. A built-in low-battery floor auto-disables on battery so your Mac can sleep normally instead of dying mid-overnight.
• ⏱️ Timers that actually stop. Pick a duration (5 minutes to 5 hours) and Vigil turns itself off when you said it would — even after a system sleep/wake cycle.
• 💻 Two modes, one app. Caffeinate keeps your screen on while you're at your desk. Lid-Awake keeps your Mac fully running with the lid closed.
• 🪶 Lives in the menu bar. A single SF Symbol that changes with state — sleeping moon when idle, glowing sun when both modes are armed. Quit the app; your timers keep running.
• 📊 Knows how long it's been on. Per-session and lifetime stats — how long this session has run, total time awake across all sessions, longest session ever, total time with the lid closed.
• 🔔 Tells you when it's done. Opt-in notification when a timer ends, so you don't come back to a session that quietly stopped an hour ago.
• 🔄 Updates itself. Daily background check via Sparkle, signed by Apple's notary service. You're always one click away from the latest version.

Install

1. Download Vigil-X.Y.Z.dmg from the latest release.
2. Open the DMG and drag Vigil.app to the Applications shortcut.
3. Open Vigil.app from /Applications. The menu-bar icon appears at the top right.

If you grabbed the .zip instead, drag Vigil.app to /Applications before opening it — macOS quarantines apps launched from Downloads, and Vigil refuses to enable from a quarantined path.

Use it

From the menu bar

Click the icon to open the popover and toggle either feature:

• Caffeinate — keeps the display and system from idling to sleep. Manual Sleep and closing the lid still work as normal. Perfect for video playback, presentations, or a long compile.
• Lid-Awake — keeps the Mac fully running with the lid closed. The first time you enable it, macOS asks for your administrator password so Vigil can set this up cleanly. After a one-time Approve All, it works without prompts.

Each feature has its own duration menu (Indefinitely, 5/10/15/30 minutes, 1/2/5 hours), a "Notify when timer ends" checkbox, and a Disable on low battery toggle that auto-stops the feature once your battery drops to the chosen percentage on battery power.

Open Stats in either card for live session and lifetime totals.

From the command line

After make install:

vigil caffeinate on                       # indefinite
vigil caffeinate on --duration 1h         # one hour, auto-stop
vigil caffeinate on --battery-floor 15    # stop at 15% on battery
vigil caffeinate off

vigil lid-awake on --duration 2h          # two-hour closed-lid run
vigil lid-awake on --battery-floor 20     # stop at 20% on battery
vigil lid-awake off

vigil status                              # human-readable status
vigil status --json                       # machine-readable for scripts
vigil doctor                              # full diagnostics

Durations: indefinite | 5m | 10m | 15m | 30m | 1h | 2h | 5h. Battery floor: any integer 1–99.

Smart defaults

• Lid-Awake refuses to start on battery without confirmation — closed lid + battery is a heat trap. Click Turn On a second time if you really mean it, or pass --force-battery on the CLI.
• Lid-Awake ships with the battery floor on at 20% — when you walk away from a closed lid, you almost certainly want the Mac to sleep rather than run dry. Lift the toggle if you don't.
• Caffeinate's battery floor is off by default — you're at your desk; auto-disabling mid-presentation would be more annoying than helpful. Flip it on per session if you want it.
• The battery-floor trip is one-way. If Vigil disables itself because the battery hit 20%, plugging back into power doesn't silently re-arm it. You stay in control.
• Vigil keeps running when you quit it. Both features are backed by macOS LaunchAgents, so quitting the menu-bar app doesn't stop your in-flight timer or low-battery monitor.

Stays out of the way

The menu-bar icon switches between four SF Symbols depending on state — sleeping moon when idle, eye when Caffeinate is active, laptop when Lid-Awake is active, sun when both are. A tiny orange dot tells you when setup needs attention. That's it. No notification spam, no analytics, no telemetry beyond Sparkle's daily update check (which sends only User-Agent: Sparkle/… Vigil/X.Y.Z and your IP to GitHub).

Under the hood (for the curious)

Vigil holds Apple's standard IOKit power assertions to keep the system awake, plus — for Lid-Awake — a temporary, reversible pmset profile to keep the Mac running with the lid closed. When you turn a feature off (or its timer expires, or the battery floor trips), Vigil restores the exact pmset state it captured at enable time.

• The menu-bar app is a pure controller — it shells out to the bundled vigil CLI for every action.
• Active features survive menu-app quit, Sparkle updates, and admin password sheets by running as per-feature user LaunchAgents.
• Lid-Awake needs administrator rights (only for the pmset profile); Caffeinate needs nothing.
• After one-time Approve All, Lid-Awake works without password prompts via a narrowly-scoped sudoers rule limited to pmset with an in-binary argument allowlist.

Full design rationale lives in docs/0.2.0-design.md (foundational architecture) and docs/0.2.2-design.md (battery floor design + dual-model consensus notes). Security policy is in SECURITY.md.

Build from source

make app                # ad-hoc signed local build
open dist/Vigil.app

swift build -c release  # CLI only
.build/release/vigil status

sudo make install       # install the CLI to /usr/local/bin/vigil

Release builds (Developer ID + hardened runtime + notarization + Sparkle keys) are maintainer-only; see RELEASING.md.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.