keep your mac awake
a long download, a render, a build, a call on an external display. your Mac has no idea any of it matters, and dims the screen right in the middle. hop.tools holds it awake for as long as you say, and hands sleep back the moment you are done.
when you need it
- a download or an upload that has to finish unattended
- a render, a build or a long export you are not sitting over
- a presentation, where a dimming screen in front of a room is its own kind of pain
- a film on an external display, with the laptop lid shut
- anything running over ssh that dies the moment the machine dozes off
how to stop your mac from sleeping
- open the panel and switch keep-awake on
- pick how long: fifteen minutes, an hour, a few hours — or leave it on indefinitely
- the menu bar icon shows the Mac is being held awake, so you never wonder whether it is on
- switch it off, or let the time run out, and normal sleep comes straight back
there is no settings panel to dig through and nothing to undo afterwards. your energy saver preferences are untouched — hop.tools holds the Mac awake while it is on, and steps out of the way when it is not.
the lid can stay closed
closing a MacBook normally ends whatever was running. with keep-awake on, the screen goes dark and the machine keeps working — the download finishes, the film keeps playing on the external display, the build runs to the end.
it gives sleep back on its own
the failure mode of every app like this is forgetting to turn it off. a Mac that never sleeps burns battery, runs warm and eventually surprises you.
so keep-awake ends by itself: when the timer runs out, or when you quit hop.tools. there is no state left behind that outlives the app.
how it compares
there are several free apps that do only this — Caffeine, Amphetamine, KeepingYouAwake among them — and they do it well. price is not the argument here: they cost nothing too.
the argument is the menu bar. each of those is one more icon, one more login item, one more thing to update. keep-awake is one of sixteen tools sharing a single icon in hop.tools, and if it is the only one you want, you can switch the other fifteen off.
the terminal has caffeinate built in, and for a one-off it is fine. this is the same idea with a switch, a timer and a visible state.
nothing is sent anywhere
hop.tools has no accounts, no profiles and no telemetry. holding the Mac awake is a local call to the system and nothing about it leaves the machine.
frequently asked questions
- does it keep the screen on, or just the Mac?
- the Mac stays awake and the screen can go dark — that is the point when the lid is closed or a long job is running. you are not forced to burn the display for hours.
- does it change my energy saver settings?
- no. nothing in system settings is touched. hop.tools holds the Mac awake while keep-awake is on, and stops the moment it is off.
- what happens if i forget to turn it off?
- set a duration and it ends by itself. quitting hop.tools also returns normal sleep straight away.
- will my Mac still sleep when the battery runs low?
- macOS keeps its own safeguards. keep-awake asks the system not to idle-sleep; it does not override low-battery behaviour.
- is it really free?
- completely. no trial, no pro tier, nothing to unlock — and the other fifteen tools come with it.
other tools in hop.tools
- Keyboard Lock — Wipe the keyboard clean without shutting the Mac down.
- Text Recognition — Pull text off anything on screen — even a paused video or a locked PDF.
- Color Picker — Any pixel on screen, in hex, rgb and hsl at once.