Keeping your Mac awake · click the baby
When the baby cries, your Mac stays up.
Baby lives in your menu bar. Click it and your Mac won't sleep or turn off the display until you click again, a timer runs out, or the job that asked finishes.
Three ways to keep it awake
Each one holds a lease. Baby keeps the Mac on while any lease is held and lets it sleep once the last one ends.
Baby: keeping your Mac awakeUntil you click again
Left-click the icon to start. The baby cries while sleep is blocked and dozes off when it isn't.
For a set time
Choose Activate for, then Permanent or one of your presets. Add durations like 45 minutes in Settings.
$ baby run -- make test
$ baby hold --pid 48211
$ baby status --json
For as long as a job runs
Scripts and coding agents take a lease that ends when their command or process exits.
The rest
Named leases
The menu lists who is keeping the Mac awake, like “Greendale CI” or “Nightly backup until 11:30 PM”, and releases any one of them.
Command line tool
Install it from Settings to link baby into ~/.local/bin. It opens Baby when needed, and baby help lists every option.
Login and launch
Start Baby at login, and have it start preventing sleep the moment it opens.
Built on caffeinate
Baby runs macOS's own caffeinate while a lease is held. If Baby quits or crashes, caffeinate stops with it, so your Mac never gets stuck awake.
Signed updates
Baby reads a signed feed and installs notarized releases without a trip to the browser.