Barista

Keep your Mac awake. One click from the menu bar.

Barista is a tiny, native macOS menu bar app that prevents your Mac from sleeping — a free, modern replacement for Caffeine, Amphetamine and KeepingYouAwake. One click to caffeinate, pick a duration (15m, 30m, 1h, 4h, 8h, 12h, or indefinite), and your Mac stays awake until you say otherwise. Built with stx + Craft so it stays out of the way: a 1.4MB native webview instead of a bundled browser, and under 100ms to a visible menu bar icon.

As a bonus, Barista also tidies up your menu bar.

Why Barista

Features

• Caffeinate, primarily — Prevent system sleep, display sleep and idle sleep with customizable durations (15m, 30m, 1h, 4h, 8h, 12h, indefinite). Left-click the cup to brew or stop; the icon fills while your Mac is awake and the remaining time is on hover.
• Right-click for everything else — A native menu with the current status, the durations, the menu bar controls, preferences and updates.
• Caffeinate on startup — Optional: start the app already caffeinated, so your Mac is awake the moment you log in.
• Global hotkey — Toggle caffeinate (or the menu bar) without reaching for the mouse.
• Menu bar management (bonus) — Collapse and organize menu bar items, with optional auto-collapse and an always-hidden section.
• Launch at login — Start Barista when you log in.
• Self-updating — Checks its own GitHub releases, verifies the download by SHA-256, and can install and relaunch.
• Native performance — Craft's native webview does the rendering, so there is no bundled browser. Startup is under 100ms.
• Beautiful UI — Dark-themed popup window with intuitive controls.

Get Started

bun install
bun run dev

Development

# Run the app in development mode
bun run dev

# Lint
bun run lint
bun run lint:fix

# Build a distributable .app + .dmg (and a signed .pkg when signing is configured)
bun run build

Architecture

Barista is a stx menu bar app. @stacksjs/stx is the only dependency — it wraps Craft, the Zig-powered native webview, and the desktop APIs (power management, preferences, system tray) behind one package.

createMenuBarApp from @stacksjs/stx/menubar owns the local server, the preference store and the login item, so the app is a declaration rather than a runtime:

app.ts                 createMenuBarApp: context, routes, tray menu
build.ts               Compile + package (DMG, and App Store .pkg when signed)
src/barista.stx        The popup — signals-driven, no vanilla DOM code
src/caffeinate.ts      Named wrapper over the desktop power API
src/tray.ts            The menu bar item: its cup icon and its menu
src/durations.ts       The durations the popup and tray both offer
src/preferences.ts     Preference shape and defaults
src/updates.ts         Self-update from GitHub releases

See the stx guide, Menu Bar Apps, for the pattern.

Contributing

We welcome contributions! Please feel free to submit a Pull Request.

Credits

• Hidden Bar for being the initial code inspiration
• Bartender
• Chris Breuer
• All Contributors

Sponsors

We would like to extend our thanks to the following sponsors for funding Stacks development. If you are interested in becoming a sponsor, please reach out to us.

• JetBrains
• The Solana Foundation

License

The MIT License (MIT). Please see LICENSE for more information.

Made with 💙