Vigilus

A tiny macOS menu bar app that keeps your Mac awake — on your terms. Flip sleep on or off in a click, prevent sleep for a set time, or set a recurring weekly schedule. No dependencies, no background daemons, just a single Swift binary.

🦉 Constant vigilance.

Why

caffeinate and pmset already do this from the terminal, but you have to remember the flags, and caffeinate dies when you close the shell. Vigilus puts both in the menu bar with sane defaults and remembers your state across launches.

Features

• Prevent / Allow Sleep — a one-click power assertion (like caffeinate), no admin password needed. Optionally keep the display awake too.
• Prevent Sleep for… — a timed window (15 min → 4 hours) with a live countdown in the menu. Auto-resumes if you quit and relaunch mid-timer.
• Weekly schedule — recurring rules ("keep awake Mon–Fri, 9am–6pm"). Overlapping windows are merged automatically.
• System sleep settings — toggle idle sleep permanently per power source (AC / Battery) via pmset. Remembers and restores your real timer instead of leaving it at "Never". Requires admin auth (native macOS dialog).
• Launch at Login — register via SMAppService, no helper bundle.
• Menu bar icon reflects state at a glance: 🔥 awake / 🌙 sleep allowed.

Install

Download (recommended)

Grab the latest Vigilus-*.zip from the Releases page. It's a universal build that runs natively on both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs (macOS 13+).

1. Unzip it — you'll get Vigilus.app.
2. Drag Vigilus.app into your /Applications folder.
3. Launch it. Because the app is ad-hoc signed (not notarized), the first launch may be blocked by Gatekeeper — right-click → Open, then confirm, or allow it under System Settings → Privacy & Security.

Vigilus runs as a menu bar accessory (LSUIElement) — no Dock icon.

Build from source

Requires macOS 13+ and the Swift toolchain (Xcode or Command Line Tools — verify with swift --version).

git clone git@github.com:dationguyen/Vigilus.git
cd Vigilus
./build.sh

This compiles Sources/*.swift into a universal binary, assembles build/Vigilus.app, and ad-hoc code-signs it.

open build/Vigilus.app          # run it
cp -r build/Vigilus.app /Applications/   # install it

Usage

Click the menu bar icon:

Action	What it does	Admin?
Prevent / Allow Sleep	Toggle a power assertion now	No
Prevent Sleep for ▸	Keep awake for a fixed duration	No
Also Keep Display Awake	Hold the display on as well as the system	No
Edit Schedule…	Manage recurring weekly keep-awake rules	No
Sleep on AC / Battery	Permanently enable/disable idle sleep per source	Yes
Launch at Login	Start Vigilus automatically	No

The temporary and permanent controls are independent: power assertions stop when the app quits, while pmset changes persist system-wide until you flip them back.

How it works

• Temporary sleep prevention uses IOKit power assertions (kIOPMAssertionTypePreventUserIdleSystemSleep / kIOPMAssertionTypeNoDisplaySleep) — no privileges required.
• Permanent changes shell out to /usr/bin/pmset via the native admin authorization dialog, and read configured timers back from pmset -g custom.
• Preferences (display-awake choice, schedule rules, saved sleep timers, current manual state) persist in UserDefaults.

Project layout

Sources/main.swift        Menu bar app, power assertions, pmset, login item
Sources/Scheduler.swift   Recurring weekly schedule engine + editor window
build.sh                  Compiles, bundles, and signs Vigilus.app

Support

If Vigilus saves you a few trips to the terminal, you can buy me a coffee ☕

License

MIT © 2026 Thanh Dat Nguyen