A lightweight macOS menu bar timer that locks, dims, or sleeps your Mac after a countdown.
Set a screen-off timer before bed — give your Mac one last task and let it auto-lock or sleep when time's up.
English · 简体中文
Before going to sleep you often want to leave your Mac running for a little longer — until a script finishes, an AI agent completes a task, or a download wraps up. But the macOS "turn display off" delay is a fixed setting: 5 minutes this time, 1 hour the next — and changing it means digging into System Settings every single time.
SleepBar moves that control to your menu bar. Click the icon, pick a duration, and your screen stays awake for exactly that long. When the countdown ends, your Mac automatically locks, turns off the display, or even goes to sleep — whatever you chose. Your task finishes, and your Mac rests.
No system settings are modified and no
sudois required. The moment the timer ends, everything returns to normal.
- ⏱️ Countdown screen-off — presets of 5 / 10 / 15 / 30 min, 1 hour, or any custom duration. The remaining time ticks live in the menu bar.
- 🔒 Lock screen — lock to the login window when time's up.
- 🖥️ Turn off display — lock and power down the display to save energy.
- 💤 Sleep — put the whole Mac to sleep when the timer ends.
- ♾️ Keep awake forever (Never) — one click to keep the screen on indefinitely; great for long tasks, presentations, or watching videos.
- 🔁 Timed Lock — “lock after 5 min idle, for the next 2 hours.” Two numbers, one sentence: how long of no input triggers a lock, and how long the whole thing runs. SleepBar then auto-locks every time you've been idle that long, re-arming after each unlock, until the time's up. The "run for" duration is a fixed countdown — locking or unlocking never resets it. No permissions required (reads system idle time only, never intercepts input).
- 🧠 Remembers your custom duration — your last value is saved and pre-filled, so your favorite time is one click away.
- 🌐 7 languages — English, 中文, Español, العربية, Português (Brasil), 日本語, Deutsch. Switch the entire menu instantly; follows your system language on first launch.
- 🪶 Extremely lightweight — a single Swift file, zero dependencies, no background service. ~0% CPU when idle.
| Chinese UI | English UI |
|---|---|
 |
 |
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ddasy/SleepBar/main/install.sh | bashgit clone https://github.com/ddasy/SleepBar.git
cd SleepBar
./install.shThe installer automatically: checks the Swift toolchain → compiles → builds ~/Applications/SleepBar.app → adds the sleepbar shell alias → starts the app with launch-at-login enabled. No sudo needed — everything lives in your home directory. The 💤 icon appears in your menu bar right away and launches automatically on every login (toggle anytime: menu-bar icon → Launch at Login).
Quit it by accident? Start it again with Spotlight (⌘Space) → SleepBar, or just type:
sleepbarThe
sleepbaralias lives in~/.zshrc, so it works in Terminal windows opened after the install.
If prompted to install the Xcode Command Line Tools, accept it and re-run the script. That's Apple's built-in compiler toolchain — no full Xcode required.
Grab the latest SleepBar-vX.Y.Z.dmg from the Releases page, open it, and drag SleepBar.app into Applications. Then click the menu-bar icon → Launch at Login to start it automatically every time you log in.
The DMG is ad-hoc signed but not Apple-notarized, so on first launch you may need to right-click the app → Open. (The source-based options above avoid this.)
./uninstall.shStops the app, removes launch-at-login, and deletes the app, the sleepbar alias, and preferences.
Click the 💤 icon in the menu bar:
| Section | Option | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Screen Off Timer | 5 / 10 / 15 / 30 min, 1 hour | Starts a countdown; click again to cancel |
| Custom… | Enter any number of minutes; remembered & pre-filled next time | |
| Never | Keep the screen on forever (menu bar shows ∞) |
|
| When Time's Up | Lock Screen | Lock only |
| Lock & Turn Off Display | Lock + power down the display | |
| Lock, Off & Sleep | Lock + put the Mac to sleep | |
| Timed Lock | Timed Lock… | A two-line dialog: "Lock after [N] min idle" and "Run for [M] min, then stop." Auto-locks every time you're idle that long, until the time's up. Click again to stop. Both values are remembered & pre-filled |
| Language | English · 中文 · Español · العربية · Português (Brasil) · 日本語 · Deutsch | Switch the whole menu instantly |
| Launch at Login | toggle | Auto-start when you log in (a standard macOS Login Item). install.sh turns it on by default — uncheck here to disable |
| Quit | Quit SleepBar |
"When Time's Up" is a set-once, remembered preference applied at the end of every countdown.
Timed Lock is independent of the screen-off timer (they're mutually exclusive — starting one stops the other). Example: at 12:00, choose lock after 5 min idle and run for 120 min. From 12:00 to 14:00 your Mac locks itself after every 5 minutes of inactivity; unlock, step away again, and it re-locks after another 5 minutes. The 2-hour countdown keeps running regardless of how often you lock or unlock.
SleepBar is a friendly menu-bar wrapper around capabilities already built into macOS:
| Feature | Under the hood |
|---|---|
| Keep awake / countdown | caffeinate -dis -t <seconds> (no sudo, auto-expires) |
| Turn off display | pmset displaysleepnow |
| Sleep | pmset sleepnow |
| Lock screen | SACLockScreenImmediate from login.framework |
| Timed Lock — idle detection | CGEventSource.secondsSinceLastEventType (read-only system idle time; no Accessibility permission) |
| Timed Lock — re-arm after unlock | com.apple.screenIsUnlocked distributed notification (event-driven, zero polling while locked) |
| Remembered preferences | UserDefaults (language / end action / custom duration / lock interval / window) |
Because it relies on the temporary caffeinate mechanism, it never alters your system energy settings — the moment the timer ends, your Mac is back to its normal behavior.
- ~0% CPU when idle — no timer runs unless a countdown is active.
- During a countdown, a single 1 Hz timer with system-coalesced
toleranceupdates only a short text label — no per-frame allocations. - Timed Lock never busy-polls. Instead of checking input every second, it schedules the next wake-up exactly
interval − current idleseconds ahead, so it wakes the CPU at most once per interval while you're active — and while the screen is locked it does zero polling, simply waiting for the unlock notification. The remaining-time readout is computed only when you open the menu, not on a background tick. - Built with
-O(release optimization); a single binary, no embedded frameworks, no helper processes.
git clone https://github.com/ddasy/SleepBar.git
cd SleepBar
./run.sh # compile and launch; re-run after edits for a hot reloadOr manually:
swiftc -O main.swift -o SleepBar -framework AppKit
./SleepBarThe whole program is a single main.swift (~580 lines of AppKit) with no third-party dependencies.
- macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later (uses the native
sectionHeadermenu API) - Xcode Command Line Tools (
xcode-select --install; the installer prompts you)
Q: "Lock screen" uses a private API — is that safe?
A: It calls the lock function inside the system's login.framework (equivalent to pressing your lock-screen shortcut). It needs no Accessibility permission and sends no data anywhere. If a future major macOS release changes it, open an issue.
Q: Will it secretly keep my Mac awake? A: No. The screen stays on only when you actively pick a duration or "Never." On launch it's idle and fully respects your system settings.
Q: Does it survive a reboot? A: Yes. The installer registers SleepBar as a Login Item, so it reappears in the menu bar after you log in. Don't want that? Uncheck Launch at Login in the menu.
Q: I quit it by accident — how do I start it again?
A: Spotlight (⌘Space) → SleepBar, or type sleepbar in Terminal.
A free, open-source menu bar utility for macOS: auto lock screen, timed / recurring lock on idle, sleep timer, display sleep / screen-off timer, keep awake, prevent sleep, and a friendly caffeinate GUI. A minimal, native Swift alternative to Amphetamine, KeepingYouAwake, and Caffeine.
Suggested GitHub topics: macos · menubar · menu-bar · swift · appkit · caffeinate · sleep-timer · screen-lock · auto-lock · idle-lock · keep-awake · display-sleep · productivity · macos-app
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