DarkWake

Your Mac is not sleeping as much as you think it is.

darkwake.vercel.app · free · MIT · no permissions, no network

Close the lid and macOS keeps waking up — for Wi-Fi traffic, for maintenance timers, for an app that never let go of a sleep assertion. It records every one of these events, with the reason and the battery level at the time. Then it buries them in ~85,000 lines of pmset -g log that nobody reads.

DarkWake reads them for you.

Install

git clone https://github.com/nickzsche21/darkwake && cd darkwake && ./build.sh
open build/DarkWake.app          # menu bar app
./build/darkwake --week          # or just the CLI

Put the CLI on your PATH if you want it everywhere:

sudo ln -sf "$PWD/build/DarkWake.app/Contents/MacOS/darkwake" /usr/local/bin/darkwake

Use

darkwake	last night: what woke it, and what it cost
darkwake --week	every night macOS still remembers
darkwake --now	what is holding your Mac awake this second
darkwake --json	the whole analysis, machine readable
darkwake --render out.png	draw the panel offscreen, light and dark
darkwake --gif demo.gif	record the report as an animated terminal GIF
darkwake --stats	parser sanity numbers, to check the work

The menu bar icon is filled and orange while something is holding sleep open, and plain otherwise. Click it for last night; there is a 7-night view behind it.

What it reads

Two commands, both of which need no privileges at all — no root, no Screen Recording, no Accessibility, no TCC prompt of any kind:

• pmset -g log — sleep, wake and dark-wake events, plus every power assertion that was created and released, with the process that owned it
• pmset -g assertions — what is holding an assertion right now

There is no network code in this program. Nothing is uploaded, and there is nothing to sign in to.

Two things it does that a grep does not

It translates. A raw wake reason looks like smc.sysState.Wake(0x70070000) wifibt SMC.OutboxNotEmpty wlan E_TKO_TCP_DATA ARPT/. That is "Wi-Fi traffic woke it — that's Wake for network access". Turning those tokens into English is most of the value here.

It does the interval maths properly. A released assertion reports how long it was held, but that hold often starts before the window you are looking at, and a process like coreaudiod holds one assertion per audio context. Summing the durations gave "coreaudiod: 279h" inside an 8-hour night. DarkWake clips each hold to the window and unions the overlapping ones per process, so the answer can never exceed the length of the night.

Honest limits

• Gatekeeper. build.sh ad-hoc signs the app. That is enough to run it on the machine that built it, and not enough for anyone who downloads a build: macOS will refuse to open it until it is signed with a Developer ID and notarised. Build from source, or right-click → Open and accept the warning.
• macOS keeps roughly a week of power log, sometimes less. DarkWake cannot show you more history than the system kept.
• Battery numbers need battery. A night on the charger tells you nothing about drain, and DarkWake says so rather than inventing a figure.
• Assertions are not the whole story. An app can drain your battery while the Mac is awake without ever holding an assertion. This explains sleep, not everything.
• runningboardd, cloudd and assertiond hold assertions for other apps. DarkWake digs the real app out of the reason string where it can, but the attribution is only as good as what the daemon recorded.

Build

Swift + AppKit, no dependencies, no Xcode project. One binary is both the CLI and the menu bar app; LSUIElement keeps it out of the Dock.

./build.sh

MIT.