Amber
Display + System
The screen stays on and the Mac stays awake. For presentations, dashboards, reading a long document or watching a remote session without touching the trackpad every few minutes.
Vigilio for macOS, free
Keep your Mac awake. Exactly as long as you need.
A small menu bar app that holds off sleep while a download finishes, a build runs or a call goes long. Pick a time, click once, and your Mac stays on. When the timer ends, normal sleep comes back by itself.
Two modes
Choose what stays awake. The colour tells you which one is on, in the panel and in the switch.
Cyan
System Only
The display may go dark, the Mac keeps working. For downloads, backups, renders and builds that should finish while you are away, without burning the screen for hours.
Any length, one click.
Six presets cover most days. For everything else, roll the wheels to any time up to 48 hours.
- 15 min
- 1 h
- 4 h
- 8 h
- 24 h
- Until off
The switch fills with colour and drains as the session runs, the panel counts down to the second, and the end time is written underneath. Vigilio remembers your last duration and mode for the next click.
Small, and finished
The things you only notice when a utility gets them wrong.
- Lives in the menu bar
- An eye icon, open when your Mac is awake, outlined when it may sleep. A timed session shows the time left right next to it. No Dock icon, no window to manage.
- One click to toggle
- Option-click or right click the icon to start or stop at once with the last duration you used. A plain click opens the panel.
- Cleans up after itself
- The power assertion is released when the timer ends, when you quit, log out or shut down. If the app ever crashed, macOS would drop it too. Nothing stays behind in your settings.
- Honest countdown
- The timer runs on the system clock, so the end time stays right even if the Mac sleeps anyway, for example when you close the lid.
- Display off on demand
- Turn Display Off Now darkens the screen immediately while a System Only session keeps your job running.
- Launch at login
- One switch in the gear menu, registered the way macOS expects, visible in System Settings under Login Items.
- Signed updates
- Vigilio checks for a new version once a day. Every update is signed with our key and verified before it installs.
Download Vigilio
Free. No account, no telemetry, no ads.
Download Vigilio-1.0.0-1.dmg- 1Open the disk image.
- 2Drag Vigilio to Applications.
- 3Open it. The eye appears in your menu bar.
- Version
- 1.0.0 (build 1)
- Released
- 1 November 2026
- Size
- 2.0 MB, disk image
- Requires
- macOS 14 Sonoma or later, Apple silicon and Intel
- Signature
- Developer ID, notarized by Apple
- Price
- Free, see the terms
- SHA-256
647010963fd2d8435a17e1fe17b833b5e88bfb192901225e7a29036d42004cd2- Check it
shasum -a 256 ~/Downloads/Vigilio-1.0.0-1.dmg
Questions
- Is it really free?
- Yes. No account, no trial, no ads, no paid tier. Vigilio is a small tool we use ourselves and give away.
- How is it different from caffeinate?
- Same mechanism. Vigilio creates the same public IOKit power assertions that the caffeinate command does, and adds a timer, two modes and a menu bar switch so you do not need a Terminal window open.
- Does it keep a MacBook awake with the lid closed?
- No. Closing the lid puts a MacBook to sleep unless it is on power with an external display connected, and power assertions do not override that. Vigilio stops idle sleep, the kind that kicks in when you step away.
- What does it send over the network?
- Only the daily update check: a request for the update feed, which carries your IP address, the app version and a user agent. No usage data, no identifiers, no analytics. Details are in the privacy policy.
- How do I remove it?
- Open the gear menu, choose Quit Vigilio, then move Vigilio from Applications to the Trash. That is all; it installs nothing else.