Free and open source for macOS

The owl that keeps your Mac awake.

Barred is a tiny menu-bar app. Eyes shut, your Mac sleeps like normal. Eyes wide open, it stays awake, even with the lid shut. It also pins your fans at max, gives external monitors real brightness keys, and shows live CPU, GPU, RAM and disk meters.

Download for macOS View source

Version 1.0 · 707 KB · macOS 13+ · Apple Silicon · First launch help SHA-256: edaab9e02a32ca14e33b2b2a66e50a04a339de67f315a952348a35a729b0a5d3

Hover or tap the owl to wake it.

One owl, a handful of switches.

Click the owl in your menu bar. Everything is a toggle, everything is remembered across launches, and nothing lives in your Dock.

Keep awake, even lid shut

Holds an IOPMAssertion against idle sleep and runs pmset disablesleep 1 so closing the lid does not put your Mac to sleep. Dropped automatically on quit.

Fans: Auto or Max

Pins every fan at its maximum RPM through a tiny bundled SMC helper, barred-fan. Re-applied after wake, handed back to macOS on quit.

Brightness keys for external monitors

The keys follow your pointer. Over an external display they drive its backlight over DDC/CI, then dim in software all the way to black. Shift+Option for fine steps.

Hardware meters

Little SSD, RAM stick, graphics card and CPU icons that fill with disk use, memory used, GPU and CPU load. Each has its own switch; hover for exact figures.

Display arranging

Move your laptop screen to the left or right of your monitors in one click, like dragging it in System Settings, without changing which display is main.

Touch ID, and a CPU-paced owl

Swap password prompts for your fingerprint. The owl's head outline circles like a RunCat cat, crawling when idle and blurring when your CPU is pegged. Starts on login if you want.

Install

Download the app, or build it yourself in under a minute.

  1. Download Barred.zip and unzip it.
  2. Move Barred.app to your Applications folder.
  3. Open it once. Then see first launch below.

First launch. Barred is ad-hoc signed, not notarized by Apple (no Developer ID), so Gatekeeper blocks it the first time. After you try to open it once, go to System Settings › Privacy & Security, scroll down and click Open Anyway.

Or clear the quarantine flag from Terminal:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Barred.app

You can check the download against the SHA-256 above with shasum -a 256 Barred.zip.

Build from source

Requires macOS 13 or later and a Swift toolchain (Xcode or the Command Line Tools).

# clone and build
git clone https://github.com/noahjohnson0/barred-awake.git
cd barred-awake
./build.sh

# run it
open build/Barred.app

build.sh compiles with SwiftPM, assembles a menu-bar-only app bundle (no Dock icon), and ad-hoc signs it so the login item works locally. "Start on Boot" may need a one-time approval in System Settings › General › Login Items.

Permissions, plainly.

Barred asks for exactly what each switch needs, and nothing phones home.

  • Admin password (first time). Keeping awake with the lid shut and fan control run as root, so macOS asks for your password.
  • Touch ID setup (optional). Copies the fan helper to /Library/PrivilegedHelperTools/barred-fan (root-owned) and installs a sudoers drop-in at /etc/sudoers.d/barred.
  • Accessibility (optional). Needed only for brightness keys on external monitors, so Barred can see those key presses.

What the sudoers drop-in allows: exactly four commands, run without a password: pmset -a disablesleep 1, pmset -a disablesleep 0, barred-fan max and barred-fan auto. Nothing else.

Touch ID is a convenience gate inside the app, not a privilege boundary: any process running as you could flip those four switches. To undo, sudo rm the two files above.

Line drawing of a barred owl perched on an open laptop