Home » macOS » Prevent Mac from Automatically Going to Sleep

Prevent Mac from Automatically Going to Sleep

by Mrinal Saha
Prevent your Mac from automatically going to sleep

One thing that every new Mac user notice pretty soon is that; their computer put itself to sleep after some time of inactivity.

Prevent your Mac from automatically going to sleep

This is a useful feature, introduce to save battery. But often this feature becomes irritating. For instance when rendering video, compiling code or downloading something from the internet. This is because one has to repeatedly touch the trackpad or press a key on the keyboard to prevent Mac from sleeping.

Prevent Mac from Automatic Sleeping- using default setting

But like many others, if you don’t like this auto-sleep feature, then you can easily disable it, by tweaking energy saver option under system preferences.

To get started, click on the Apple logo on your desktop > select System preference from the drop down list > click Energy Saver > a new window will open showing options to change computer sleep.

prevent screen to turn off in mac

The rest is simple, based on your preference you can drag the slider left or right to adjust the sleep time. If you don’t want your Mac to sleep ever, then drag the slider all the way to the right, where it say never. Once you are done adjusting the setting for both battery and charging mode, only close the window, and you will be saved.

Prevent Mac from Automatic Sleep – Using Caffeine 

However, the modifying default setting, is not a good solution, because of most of the time, you would want your Mac to go to sleep like it normal do, and only occasionally, you may want your Mac to stay awake. Although we can manually change the setting each time we want, by going to system preference, but that won’t be a geeky thing to do. Right !

So in such case, when you need a sleep timer for Mac, you can download an app called caffeine. It is among the favorite apps, and that has been there since ages. Once the app is install, you will see a small cute coffee symbol on the upper right side of the toolbar. Clicking on it will bring the option to prevent you Mac from going to sleep from different time interval ranging from 5 min, 15 min to all the way up to 5 hours or never.

caffeine for mac

However, if you rarely use this feature, and don’t want to download third-party app, then you can use the following command as suggest by uOS daily,

pmset noidle mac command line to prevent it form sleeping

On your terminal type pmset noidle, this will prevent Mac from going to sleep and stop this command press CTRL+c on the same terminal.

Prevent you Mac from going to sleep after closing the lid

Unlike Windows, there are no options on Mac to keep the system ON while the lid is close. However, when we have to listen to only music or podcast on our Mac, there is no point in keeping the lid open.

 

In such case when you want to ‘prevent Mac from going to sleep after the lid is close’ you can use the app called – No sleep. It is small simple to use the app and works like it says. One thing that I like is that, it also gives you option to never sleep with an AC adapter connected, or when running on battery

Caution: Never move or travel with your Mac, when the lid is close but the system is running. This is because, shaking of Macbook, can cause obstruction to spinning of the hard drive, resulting in even HDD failure.

Credits: Top image from unsplash

You may also like