Nightjar

What it does

Nightjar holds your Mac awake from the menu bar: one switch, a countdown beside it, and everything else out of the way until you want it. It is named after the bird that stays up all night.

• One choice, not three switches. Keep the Mac and the display awake, keep just the Mac awake and let the screen sleep, or nothing at all.
• A countdown you can actually see, in the menu bar next to the symbol, in digits of equal width so nothing jitters. It stops at zero.
• Conditions that switch it on by themselves: while an app is running, while an external display is plugged in, while a volume is mounted, while the power adapter is connected, or while the battery is above a level you pick.
• It tells you the truth. Staying awake with the display off only works on the power adapter; on battery macOS accepts the request and then ignores it, and Nightjar says so rather than failing quietly.
• It shows what else is keeping the Mac awake, named process by process.
• Battery rules, so a session stops before it flattens a laptop, and an optional notification when the battery runs low while the Mac is kept awake.
• Links and a command line for Shortcuts, Raycast, a browser or a script.

Requires macOS 14 Sonoma or later. Available in thirty-four languages.

Automation

Three actions are ready in the Shortcuts app with no setup: keep awake for a while or with no limit, stop keeping awake, and ask whether Nightjar is keeping the Mac awake. Siri and Spotlight know them too. Every command exists both as a link and on the command line, so Shortcuts, Raycast, a browser or a script can drive it:

nightjar://activate?minutes=30
nightjar://activate?until=17:30
nightjar://toggle

The program inside the app takes the same arguments and hands them to the running copy:

"/Applications/Nightjar.app/Contents/MacOS/Nightjar" --activate --minutes=30

Privacy in one paragraph

Nightjar holds open the power assertions macOS already provides. It reads nothing about you, makes no network connection at all, and has no account. Your settings live in the app's own sandbox container. The full privacy policy says the same thing at greater length.