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2026 · personal · private

greendot

Keep the Slack green dot on while you are away

Role
Design and implementation
Period
2026.07
Status
Verified on macOS · Windows unverified
Stack
Python, macOS, Windows, PyInstaller
Links
GitHub

What it does

Keeps Slack (and other messengers) showing you as active while you are away. Two things at once:

  1. Sleep prevention: keeps the system and display awake. caffeinate on macOS, SetThreadExecutionState on Windows.
  2. Mouse jiggle: periodically moves the mouse 1px and back, generating a real input event to defeat “no input for 30 minutes → away”.

Design

  • The working code uses only the standard library (ctypes). Only the tray icon needs pystray + Pillow; without them, it runs as a window.
  • Closing the window hides to the tray instead of quitting. Green = running, gray = stopped.
  • Settings (interval, options, auto-stop, window position) are saved; launch at login via the Windows Run key or macOS LaunchAgents; an auto-stop timer prevents leaving it on all night.
  • On Windows, PyInstaller produces a single ~19 MB exe that runs on a PC without Python. Batch-script variants remain for environments that block the exe.

Status

Verified live on macOS; the Windows build is unverified.