Your Mac looks asleep.
The work keeps running.
Lidless keeps your Mac awake while the screen is locked. The display can switch off to save power — the system, your downloads and your remote sessions stay alive. One switch, that's it.
Free · macOS 12.0+ · v0.1.0 · No account. No daemon. No dock icon.
Small app, one job, done right
No bloat, no background services you can't see. Just the controls that matter.
One-tap keep awake
Flip one switch and your Mac won't fall asleep. The screen still dims and locks normally — only idle system sleep is blocked.
Only when plugged in
Optionally pause on battery and resume the moment you plug back in. Great for laptops you don't want draining on the couch.
Lives in the menu bar
No dock icon, no always-on window. Click the tray icon for a little panel; click away and it tucks itself back while staying active.
Cross-platform
The same one-switch tool runs on Windows too, with a Modern Standby hint when your wireless adapter would otherwise nap.
Featherweight & native
Built on Tauri with hand-written system calls — no Electron, no heavyweight runtime. It just sits there sipping nothing.
Nothing leaves your Mac
No account, no telemetry, no network calls of its own. Lidless only talks to the OS power APIs — and nothing else.
Built for the moments you step away
Lock the screen, walk off, and let the machine keep working. A few of the things people leave running:
- Claude Code
Walk away while Claude Code keeps coding
Kick off a long agentic run, then lock your Mac and step out. Lidless keeps the system awake so the task finishes — instead of stalling the moment the lid closes.
- Remote access
Reconnect from anywhere
SSH, RustDesk, VNC or Screen Sharing back to your machine. The Mac stays online and reachable while locked, so your tunnel doesn't drop.
- Long builds & CI
Don't babysit the build
Compiles, Docker images, local CI and test suites that take an hour keep running. Lock the screen, save power on the display, finish the job.
- Big transfers
Let large downloads finish
Model weights, datasets, container layers, OS images — multi-gigabyte transfers complete overnight without the system dozing off mid-download.
- Render & encode
Overnight renders and exports
Video encodes, audio batches and 3D renders run to completion while you sleep. Wake up to finished files, not a paused job.
- Always reachable
Stay present for your team
Keep chat, collaboration and self-hosted services responsive on a locked Mac — no "away" status the moment you step out for coffee.
How it actually works
No tricks, no fake mouse jiggling. Lidless asks macOS — politely, the supported way — to hold off on sleep.
- 1
It holds a power assertion
On macOS, Lidless creates an IOKit PreventUserIdleSystemSleep assertion — the same mechanism the OS itself uses. The system stays awake; the display is free to sleep.
- 2
It watches the power source
A single background thread polls power state. With "only when plugged in" on, unplugging cleanly releases the assertion and plugging back in restores it.
- 3
It gets out of your way
No persistent window, no dock clutter. The tray panel appears on click and hides on blur, while the assertion keeps holding in the background.
All OS calls are hand-written FFI (IOKit on macOS, SetThreadExecutionState on Windows) with no third-party power crates. Open source — read every line on GitHub.
Frequently asked questions
The things people ask before downloading.
Does the screen stay on the whole time?
No — and that's the point. Your display sleeps and locks normally to save power and stay private. Only the system's idle sleep is blocked, so background work keeps running behind a locked, dark screen.
How is this different from Amphetamine or Caffeine?
Same core idea — keep the Mac awake — but Lidless is deliberately minimal: one switch, a plugged-in-only option, and a tray panel that disappears when you don't need it. It's also cross-platform and fully open source.
Will it keep my Mac online for remote access?
Yes. Because the system never goes to sleep, network stays up, so SSH, RustDesk, VNC and Screen Sharing remain reachable while the Mac is locked.
Does it drain my battery?
Keeping the system awake uses more power than sleeping, so on a laptop we recommend the "only when plugged in" option — Lidless then pauses on battery and resumes when you plug in.
Is it safe? What does it access?
Lidless only calls the operating system's power-management APIs. No account, no telemetry, no network traffic of its own. The full source is on GitHub if you'd like to verify.
Is there a Windows version?
Yes. The same one-switch app runs on Windows, with an extra hint for Modern Standby machines whose Wi-Fi adapter would otherwise sleep.