Keep Your Mac Awake with Jolt

If you've ever been frustrated by your Mac going to sleep or dimming its screen at the worst possible moment—during a presentation, while reading a long article, or when you're away from your desk for just a few minutes—Jolt might be exactly what you need.

Jolt is a lightweight macOS menu bar application that gives you simple control over your Mac's sleep behavior. Instead of diving into system preferences or running terminal commands, you can prevent your Mac from sleeping with just a click from your menu bar.

What Makes Jolt Different

The beauty of Jolt lies in its simplicity. It lives quietly in your menu bar without cluttering your dock, and uses a clever visual system to show its status. When sleep prevention is active, you'll see "⚡️ Jolt" with a lightning bolt emoji in your menu bar. When it's inactive, it simply shows "Jolt" without the emoji. This emoji-based approach eliminates the need for custom icon files while providing a clear visual indicator.

Under the hood, Jolt leverages macOS's built-in caffeinate command with optimized settings to prevent display sleep, system idle sleep, and screensaver activation. It's essentially a user-friendly wrapper around functionality that's already built into your Mac.

Practical Features

Beyond basic sleep prevention, Jolt includes some thoughtful features that make it genuinely useful for daily work. The integrated timer lets you keep your Mac awake for a specific duration—perfect for those times when you know you'll be away for exactly 30 minutes or need to keep your screen active during a lengthy download.

The "Start at Login" option means you can have Jolt ready to go whenever you need it, without having to remember to launch it manually. And since it requires macOS 10.13 or later, it works on virtually any modern Mac.

When You Might Need It

Jolt shines in scenarios where macOS's default sleep behavior gets in your way. Maybe you're giving a presentation and don't want your screen to dim during quiet moments. Perhaps you're monitoring a long-running process and need to glance at your screen periodically. Or you might be stepping away from your desk briefly but want to keep video calls or downloads active.

For developers and power users, having quick access to sleep prevention without opening Terminal or adjusting system preferences can be a real time-saver. And since it's open source and built with Go, you can easily build it from source if you prefer.

Jolt represents the kind of utility that does one thing well—keeping your Mac awake when you need it to be—without unnecessary complexity or resource overhead. Sometimes the best tools are the ones that solve a specific problem elegantly, and Jolt fits that description perfectly.

You can find Jolt on GitHub at https://github.com/nilicule/joltApp, where you can download the latest release or build it from source yourself.