Latch keeps your Mac awake — a lightweight menu bar app with a few tricks the others don't have.
Sometimes you don't want your Mac to fall asleep: a long download, a video export, a presentation, or just reading without touching the trackpad. Latch sits in your menu bar as a little octopus. Click it, and your Mac stays awake. Click it again, and everything goes back to normal.
There are plenty of apps that do this. Amphetamine is the best-known one. Latch is for people who want something small and simple that does the job without a wall of settings, plus a couple of features that are genuinely handy.
Instead of guessing how long an export or upload will take, pick the app from the menu. Latch keeps your Mac awake until that app quits, then lets it sleep and tells you it's done. No timers to set, no coming back to find your Mac asleep halfway through.
Many external hard drives go to sleep on their own after a few idle minutes. When you then open Finder or a Save dialog, everything freezes for several seconds while the drive spins back up. Latch can keep your chosen drives awake while it's active. You can switch this on or off from the menu bar at any time.
- One click to stay awake, or pick a time: 5 minutes up to 5 hours, or until you turn it off
- Until a set time, for example "stay awake until 6 pm", and extend a running timer by 15 minutes
- Countdown in the menu bar, so you can see how long is left
- Let the screen turn off while keeping the Mac itself awake
- Schedules: stay awake automatically during set hours, for example weekdays 9 to 6
- Turns itself on when you plug in an external monitor
- Turns itself off when your battery gets low, when Low Power Mode is on, or when a Focus mode starts
- Keyboard shortcut to switch it on and off from anywhere (⌥⌘K by default)
- Works with Apple Shortcuts
- Starts at login if you want it to
- Three icon styles to choose from: octopus, meerkat or night owl
- Download
Latch.dmgfrom the latest release - Open it and drag Latch into your Applications folder
- Open Latch. The octopus appears in your menu bar.
Click the octopus to switch Latch on or off. Right-click it for everything else.
Requires macOS 13 Ventura or later. Works on Apple Silicon and Intel Macs.
PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0. You can use, modify, and share Latch for free for any non-commercial purpose, as long as you keep the copyright notice and credit this project. Commercial use is not allowed without permission. Versions released before this change remain under the MIT license.