KeepMeUp

A lightweight macOS menu bar app with two power modes: keep your screen awake, or keep your Mac awake while letting the screen turn off.

The second mode is the useful one — long downloads, builds, or renders finish without the machine idle-sleeping, while the display still switches off instead of burning for hours.

Features

• Jagged star icon in the menu bar, three states (off / screen awake / device awake)
• Two independent modes, click to toggle each on/off
• Uses native caffeinate and pmset, no kernel extensions or privileged helpers
• Self-contained app bundle: vendors its own Python venv, so the installed app keeps working no matter where it was built from or whether this repo still exists
• Minimal resource usage

Requirements

• macOS 10.13 or later
• Python 3 (the system python3 is fine)

Install

git clone https://github.com/cipshadow/keepmeup.git
cd keepmeup
./install.sh

install.sh builds the app bundle (creating a private virtualenv inside it and installing rumps and pyobjc), ad-hoc signs it, and copies it to ~/Applications/KeepMeUp.app.

Then launch it from Applications or Spotlight (Cmd+Space → "KeepMeUp").

The .app bundle is built, not committed, so it will not exist until you run the install script.

How to use

Launch the app and a jagged star icon (outline) appears in the menu bar. Click it for three options:

• Awake - screen on — display and system both stay awake indefinitely. Icon becomes a glowing filled star.
• Awake - screen off — the Mac won't idle-sleep, but the display turns off after 1 minute of no input (and wakes on the next input, then turns off again after another idle minute). Icon becomes a plain filled star.
• Off — both stopped. Icon returns to the outline star.

"Quit" stops the app.

Auto-start on login

./setup_autostart.sh

This adds the installed app to your login items. To disable it later:

launchctl unload ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.local.keepmeup.plist

Troubleshooting

Nothing appears in the menu bar

Check it's running, then check the logs:

ps aux | grep keepmeup_menu | grep -v grep
cat ~/.keepmeup.log

The launcher writes startup failures to ~/.keepmeup.log and also surfaces them as a dialog, so that log is the first place to look.

The app crashes on launch, or the log mentions a missing venv or script

The bundle is self-contained, so the usual fix is to rebuild it:

./install.sh

Running the script directly (for development)

python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
python3 keepmeup_menu.py

Project structure

keepmeup/
├── keepmeup_menu.py          # the menu bar app
├── install.sh                # builds the .app bundle and installs it
├── setup_autostart.sh        # registers the LaunchAgent
├── verify.sh                 # post-install sanity checks
├── com.local.keepmeup.plist  # LaunchAgent template
└── assets/
    ├── generate_icons.py     # regenerates the icon PNGs (needs Pillow)
    ├── icon_*.png            # menu bar icons, checked in so install needs no Pillow
    └── AppIcon.icns          # app bundle icon

License

MIT — see LICENSE.