If you leave your Mac unattended for a while, it will eventually go to sleep. This isn’t a revolutionary macOS specific feature. All major desktop operating systems go to ‘sleep’ when they aren’t being used. Users have the option to configure the timeout period after which macOS will put the system to sleep. Users can even disable sleep when the system is idle and keep it awake indefinitely. There are apps that will let you prevent your Mac from going to sleep. If you don’t want to keep you Mac awake indefinitely, rather just for a short period of time, give Lungo a spin. It’s a free menu bar app that lets you temporarily disable sleep on macOS.
Temporarily Disable Sleep On macOS
Install Lungo from the Mac App Store and run it. It runs exclusively in the Menu Bar. Click the app icon and choose how long you want to keep your Mac awake. You can keep it awake indefinitely or you can keep it awake for 10 or 30 minutes, or 1 or 4 hours.
The app shows you how much time is left before your Mac will go to sleep. You can deactivate the app anytime and let macOS go to sleep as per its settings. Lungo can be set to launch at start-up.
Limitations
Lungo is a reasonably useful app for when you need to temporarily prevent your Mac from going to sleep. This temporary period might be for the duration of a movie, or perhaps you need to monitor live data on your screen but not interact with your system. The odd shortcoming with this app is that it doesn’t let you set a custom interval for preventing sleep. The app recognizes that users might not want to keep their system awake indefinitely and keeping the system awake for a limited time is useful but it’s restricted to just four time periods.
The app is useful but it can be better by giving users freedom to prevent sleep for a custom time period. There should also be an option that lets users create and save these custom periods. Theoretically, users can always tweak system settings and change the sleep time out interval but doing so manually every time you need to prevent your Mac from going to sleep isn’t productive nor convenient. The app gives users faster access to preventing sleeping when they need to and allows them to leave their system settings as they are but it needs more options.