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Comment by maxfurman

3 years ago

I remember Caffeine used to be a third-party program that would prevent your Mac from sleeping, same behavior as the `caffeinate` here. Were they acquired and incorporated into the OS?

I believe that Caffeine was a fairly simple GUI wrapper for the existing caffeinate command

  • From what I recall, caffeine app predated the caffeinate command (which was only introduced in lion). Caffeine.app also disables sleep via a completely different method than caffeinate. The latter uses a IOPMAssertion which is the recommended way to do it because it is visible in `pmset -g assertions` whereas the former doesn't use that approach (I forgot how exactly it did it, there's like 4 different methods on osx to prevent sleep).

It's been cli util on macos for 10+ years. I remember a gui util called caffeinated, though.

Caffeine was a front-end by a third party company. Used it back in the day, the command existed already though.

Since then I've moved to Amphetamine (same purpose menu-bar app, even stronger chemicals, has timed keep-awake etc).