Idle Warden
Idle Warden lives in your menu bar and does exactly one thing: it keeps your Mac from being marked idle. Click the dot to engage and it starts working; click again to pause. That is the whole app.
Most jiggler apps warp the cursor around the screen, which looks busy but does not actually count as input, so apps like Slack keep marking you away. Caffeine-style apps only stop your Mac from sleeping, which is a different problem. Idle Warden posts a real mouse-move event, so to your Mac it is indistinguishable from you touching the mouse. The idle timer resets, and your status stays green.
Your cursor never moves. The event lands at the pointer's existing position with no movement attached, which is enough for the system and invisible to everything else. And Idle Warden only speaks when you have actually gone quiet: if you are typing, clicking, or drawing, it stays out of the way entirely, because your real input is already doing the job. If you work on a pen tablet, this is why 1.2.0 matters - it will not touch your strokes.
It also holds a keep-awake assertion while engaged, so your Mac will not doze off and drop you offline entirely.
And it knows when to clock out. Right click the dot, pick a time under Turn Off At, and Idle Warden pauses itself when you get there - so you do not come back the next morning to a Mac that has been quietly pretending you were at your desk all night. Set it for tonight, or turn on Repeat Daily and let it stand down at the end of every day on its own.
- Left click the menu bar dot to toggle on and off; right click for the menu
- A solid green dot when engaged, a hollow dot when paused - the same language as Slack presence
- Start Engaged on Launch, so it begins the moment it opens
- Open at Login, so you never have to think about it
- Turn Off At, to schedule an automatic pause - presets, a custom time, or the same time every day
- Posts genuine input events, not cursor warps, so the idle timer actually resets
- Never moves your cursor and never fires while you are working, so pen tablets and drawing apps are safe
- Holds system sleep off while engaged so you never drop offline
Free to use and share.
On first launch macOS will ask for Accessibility permission - posting mouse events requires it. Grant it under System Settings > Privacy & Security > Accessibility, then quit and relaunch once and click to engage.
v1.2.0
August 6, 2026
- Stops fighting your pen. Artists reported strokes breaking mid-line, and they were right
- Your cursor no longer moves at all. Earlier versions nudged it a pixel out and back, which drawing apps read as a real pointer jump
- Idle Warden is now a dead-man switch rather than a timer: it checks whether you have actually gone quiet and skips the tick if you have not
- It will not post while a mouse or pen button is held, so a motionless press for airbrushing or blending is left alone
- The quiet check watches mouse, keyboard, scroll, and tablet events, including pen proximity
- Removed the 50ms main-thread pause the old two-event nudge needed
- No new settings. Status keeping is unchanged
v1.1.0
August 5, 2026
- New Turn Off At submenu: pick a preset from 5 PM to 10 PM, or any custom time
- Repeat Daily option, so the same time re-arms every day
- The menu shows what is pending - “Turns off at 8:00 PM today” - and Never cancels it
- A time already past today applies tomorrow; a one-shot that expires while the app is closed is dropped, not re-armed
- The schedule is checked against the wall clock, so sleeping, waking, and clock changes do not strand it
- Fixed a case where engaging twice could leave a stray timer and hold the keep-awake assertion open
v1.0.0
First public release
- Menu bar toggle with a Slack-style presence dot
- Real input-event nudge every 30 seconds, plus a keep-awake assertion
- Start Engaged on Launch and Open at Login options
- About panel with a link back to steventrotter.com for updates and other apps
- Signed, notarized, and universal (Apple Silicon + Intel)