Tip Caffeinate by Dr. Drang
Since I started following Dr. Drang’s blog I have learned some great Mac tricks. Some I use everyday.
Here’s a new one. Keep your screen awake without having to install one of the popular apps like Caffeine or Amphetamine. Dr. Drang explains how to do this with a terminal command. No new app needed.
Dr. Drang, writing on his personal blog
But you know me. Why would I use a nice polished program with a GUI when I can run a Terminal command? And even though I own Bartender, I’d still rather keep my menubar apps to a minimum.
So I use the caffeinate command, whose name, I believe, was lifted from Caffeine in what must be Apple’s lamest piece of Sherlocking ever. It’s a sort of limited version of pmset, the older, more powerful, and considerably more complicated power management utility.
Caffeinate has only a few options and the ones I use are -d, which keeps the display from sleeping, and -t which sets a timer to stop caffeinate in case I forget to. The command I used tonight was
caffeinate -dt 6000
which kept the display awake for 100 minutes (6000 seconds), enough for the 90-minute class plus a cushion.
I highly recommend Dr. Drang’s blog.