vaken 0.1.0

Tiny macOS menu bar utility to keep your Mac awake — Rust wrapper around `caffeinate`.
vaken-0.1.0 is not a library.

Vaken

CI Version Platform License

A tiny macOS menu-bar utility for keeping your Mac awake on demand.

Vaken is Swedish for awake.

crates.io · GitHub

Why

Most of the time you want closing the lid to mean sleep. Occasionally you don't — an overnight build, a long SSH session, a local agent chewing through a queue, a cargo test you want to finish on battery. Vaken adds a single menu-bar toggle for those moments, without permanently changing your sleep settings.

When enabled, Vaken keeps display, idle, disk, and system asleep states all suppressed. Toggle off (or quit the app) and your Mac goes back to normal sleep behaviour.

What it isn't

  • No Dock icon, no Cmd-Tab presence — menu bar only (LSUIElement = true).
  • No Electron, no webview, no JavaScript.
  • No telemetry, no network calls, no settings file, no auto-update.
  • A single Rust binary (~few MB), backed by macOS caffeinate.

Install

From GitHub Release (recommended)

Download Vaken.app.zip from the latest release, unzip, drag into /Applications/, launch.

First launch hits Gatekeeper ("Apple cannot check it for malicious software") because the binary isn't signed with an Apple Developer ID. Bypass it once:

  • Right-click Vaken.app → Open → confirm in the dialog, or
  • xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Vaken.app

After that it launches normally.

From crates.io

cargo install vaken
vaken &

This drops a bare binary at ~/.cargo/bin/vaken. It works, but without the .app bundle's Info.plist it'll appear in the Dock and Cmd-Tab switcher and may exit when its terminal session ends. Prefer the GitHub Release for daily use.

From source

Requires macOS, the Rust toolchain, and Cargo.

git clone https://github.com/GnomesOfZurich/vaken.git
cd vaken
cargo run                              # quick try
cargo install cargo-bundle --locked    # one-time
cargo bundle --release                 # produces target/release/bundle/osx/Vaken.app

macOS sleep caveat

Apple increasingly enforces hardware sleep when the lid closes. Vaken works best with one of:

  • plugged into power, or
  • an external display attached, or
  • the lid kept open.

Closed-lid behaviour varies by chip (Apple Silicon vs Intel), macOS version, and battery state — sometimes Vaken can keep the Mac up, sometimes the kernel sleeps anyway. Not a Vaken bug; it's the hardware policy.

How it works

When toggled on, Vaken spawns:

caffeinate -dimsu -w <vaken_pid>

-dimsu suppresses display, idle, disk, and system sleep, and asserts user-active. -w <vaken_pid> is the safety net: it tells caffeinate to watch Vaken's own PID, and the kernel terminates caffeinate the moment Vaken exits — clean quit, panic, Force Quit, kill -9, whatever. No orphan caffeinate lingering past Vaken's death; no user-space cleanup hook to fail.

Toggle off, and Vaken sends kill to the caffeinate child directly.

Contributing

Issues and PRs welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md. The project scope is deliberately narrow (one toggle, no settings, no networking); please open an issue before sending PRs that grow the surface area.

License

Dual-licensed under either of:

at your option.