Apps / Why Awake?
System · Power

Why Awake?

Find out what's keeping your Mac up.

Why Awake? shows which application is preventing your Mac from sleeping, and lets you force it to stay awake for a stretch when you actually want that. Built on go-pmset and go-caffeinate.

Download for Mac View source
Free·macOS 11+·v0.9

What it does

01

See the blocker

When something is holding sleep open, the menu shows which process and why — display assertion, audio, network share, anything pmset knows about.

02

Force stay-awake

Pick a duration from the menu; your Mac stays awake until the timer runs out.

03

Built on real macOS APIs

go-pmset for the assertion read, go-caffeinate for the keep-awake — same plumbing the system tools use.

04

Click to toggle

Left-click the menu bar to flip stay-awake on or off; right-click for the menu.

05

Set and forget

Launches at login via macOS Service Management; auto-updates from GitHub releases.

06

MIT-licensed Go

A few hundred lines of Go on top of menuet. Read the source, fork it, customize the durations.

Built with menuet

Why Awake? is open source.

It’s a few hundred lines of Go on top of menuet — the same library you can use to build your own menu‑bar app. Read the source, or start your own.

Build your own → Read the source
// caseymrm/whyawake
import "github.com/caseymrm/menuet/v2"