Lungo 2.8.3 — Mac version

If you've ever sat through a long download or watched a render bar crawl and wished Caffeine still worked properly, Lungo picks up the baton. It lives in your menu bar and stops your Mac from nodding off — no fiddling with System Settings required.

• One-click toggle from the menu bar to keep the screen bright
• Choose a fixed duration: 10 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour, or indefinitely
• Works on both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs running macOS 26
• From Sindre Sorhus, the developer behind plenty of focused little utilities

There's not much else to it — and that's the point. You click, your Mac stays awake for as long as you've asked, then it drifts back to its normal sleep schedule. Handy for presentations, file transfers, or reading a long article without tapping the trackpad every two minutes.

Watching a film without the screen dimming mid-scene

You've queued up a film, dimmed the lights, and ten minutes in the display fades to grey. Here's a quick workflow that stops it happening again:

1. Start playing your video — VLC, IINA, whatever you use.
2. Click the Lungo icon in the menu bar. Pick Indefinitely from the dropdown.
3. Watch the whole thing. No nudging the trackpad during quiet dialogue.
4. When the credits roll, click the menu bar icon again and choose Turn Off. Your Mac goes back to its usual sleep timer straight away.

If you're streaming something in a browser, the same steps apply. Some streaming sites try to keep the screen awake themselves, but not all of them manage it — Lungo fills that gap reliably.

Menu bar companion sips 15 MB of RAM on an M1 Mac mini

Lungo sits quietly in the menu bar and uses almost nothing in the way of CPU or memory. On an M1 Mac mini it idles around 12–15 MB of RAM, and Activity Monitor rarely shows it above 0.1% CPU. On an older Intel machine the numbers are similarly tiny. There's no background churn, no phoning home, no helper process hogging resources.

Stability has been solid through several macOS 26 point updates. The timer counts down without drifting, and the Turn Off command responds instantly — no lag, no beachball, no wondering whether it's still keeping the machine awake. If you've set it to launch at login, it appears in the menu bar before most other third-party apps finish loading.

One small thing worth knowing: if you pick a fixed duration and your Mac restarts mid-session, Lungo doesn't resume the timer. You'd need to set it again. For indefinite use that's rarely an issue, but it's handy to remember if you're running a long export overnight.

• macOS 26 or later
• Apple Silicon or Intel 64-bit Mac