Aquarium

Aquarium is a small macOS menu bar utility for keeping a Mac awake when the lid is closed. It can also turn the internal display brightness down while closed, limit the behavior to selected apps or processes, and stop itself around battery thresholds, e.g. to not disturb agent sessions while the lid is closed.

There are some thermal consequences to this (having your laptop on while in tight space), and your laptop may get warm. If this scares you, don't use it, I personally don't care that much.

Install

brew install --cask zimengxiong/tools/aquarium

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

Open Aquarium after installing. The app installs or updates its privileged helper on launch, and macOS will ask for administrator approval because the helper writes the system pmset disablesleep setting.

Build from source with make build, then run the debug app with make open. Install the privileged helper with make install-helper.

For a release build, run make package. The packaged app is written to .build/Aquarium-0.1.9.zip.

Aquarium requires macOS 14 or newer. The default safety settings only start above 20% battery and auto-disable below 10%.