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Open Caffeine
Keep your Mac awake
199 followers
Keep your Mac awake
199 followers
Open Caffeine is a native macOS menu bar app for keeping your Mac awake for a chosen duration. Pick presets, set a custom timer, toggle screen sleep behavior, use a global hotkey, show a countdown in the menu bar, and stop automatically at a low battery threshold. It is open source, Apple Silicon native, and built for people who want a simple, modern Caffeine-style utility without extra marketing menu items.
Open Caffeine
@sapsaldog Congrats on the launch Hoon. Cool tool
Open Caffeine
@zolani_matebese Thank you, I hope it's useful to you!
The battery threshold auto-stop is a genuinely thoughtful detail that most wake-lock utilities skip entirely. We've had long-running local processes fail silently because the Mac went to sleep mid-run, so this addresses a real pain point cleanly. How do you assert the wake lock under the hood? Are you using IOPMAssertionCreateWithName or a different IOKit approach?
Open Caffeine
@anand_thakkar1 Thanks! Yeah, under the hood it's the IOKit power-management API directly — IOPMAssertionCreateWithName with kIOPMAssertionLevelOn, not a caffeinate subprocess or NSProcessInfo.beginActivity.
Amazy.uk
What's the difference with OG Caffeine? https://www.caffeine-app.net/en/
Open Caffeine
@panphilov Honestly, not much 😄
Apps in this category are all pretty similar, and I definitely took inspiration from both Caffeine and Amphetamine when building it.
That said, since I built this one, I might be a little biased, but I think it looks nicer, feels more native to macOS Tahoe, and has a cleaner user experience. 😆
At the end of the day, people should use whichever one they like best. I just wanted something that matched my own taste and workflow.
Thanks for the feedback — I genuinely appreciate you taking the time to check it out and leave a comment.
How is this different from the original Caffeine or Amphetamine? Both are open source.I think calling this "Open" Caffeine is misleading.
Open Caffeine
@james_bathgate1 That's a fair point, and I can see why the name might be misleading.
Functionally, it's very similar to Caffeine and Amphetamine. My main goal wasn't to reinvent the category, but to build something that feels more native to macOS Tahoe. I spent more time focusing on the visual design, Tahoe-style UI, and making sure it's built specifically for modern Apple Silicon Macs.
One practical benefit is that you won't run into the "this app was built for Intel Macs" kind warnings that some older utilities may eventually trigger as Apple continues moving away from x86 compatibility.
That said, your comment about the name is valid. I honestly didn't put a huge amount of thought into the naming when I started the project, so it's something I'll probably need to think about more carefully.
Thanks for the feedback — I genuinely appreciate it.
nice one. caffeinate -d under the hood i assume? curious what made the gui worth shipping over the cli.
Open Caffeine
@qifengzheng Thanks for the comment! 😊
And yes, it's essentially the same underlying mechanism. At the end of the day, caffeinate already does the heavy lifting.
As for why a GUI is worth shipping... well, there's a reason Xerox PARC spent so much effort researching graphical user interfaces. 😄 Not because the command line couldn't do the job, but because making something more discoverable, accessible, and pleasant to use matters too.
Thanks again for checking it out!
This is the kind of tiny Mac utility I like, but the install path is the part I’d check first.
Is the GitHub release meant to be used directly, or is Open Caffeine still mainly a local build from Xcode for now?
Open Caffeine
@novamaker01 Ah, sorry — I wasn’t clear enough. You don’t need to build it yourself; just use the release package. Once it’s installed, you’ll automatically get a popup whenever there’s an update, so there’s no need to manually download new versions each time.
https://github.com/sapsaldog/open-caffeine/releases/tag/v1.0.1
Mailwarm
Auto stop at a low battery level is a great feature, I’ve killed my battery doing long downloads many times.
Open Caffeine
@thamibenjelloun Thanks! That feature actually came from exactly the same concern. I’ve had a few situations where I left my Mac awake overnight for downloads or long-running tasks and ended up draining the battery more than I wanted.
Glad to hear it sounds useful to someone else too 😊