Preventing auto-locking and sleeping by simulating user activity

This post will detail how to simulate activity on your computer in order to prevent it from auto-locking or going into sleep mode. Note that this will usually also prevent the "auto-away" functionality of various chat programs from ever marking you as "away".

Generally you should change your operating system's settings to disable sleeping and auto-locking if possible instead. These methods are for when you don't have the access or permission to change those settings (ie. locked-down devices).

Windows

This method runs a Powershell script on login that toggles scroll lock on/off every minute. Since scroll lock mostly doesn't do anything on modern systems and the script will press it twice to immediately unlock/relock it, this is basically unnoticeable to the user. However, if you have issues simply swap the two {SCROLLLOCK}s in the below command to something else. A full list of special keys can be found here.

1. Open Explorer (shortcut: Win+E)
2. Paste %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup into the location bar and hit enter to navigate there.
3. Right click in the folder and click New > Shortcut to open the shortcut creation wizard.

4. Paste the following as the shortcut's location:

   1	powershell.exe -windowstyle hidden -command "$myshell=New-Object -com \"Wscript.Shell\";while(1){$myshell.SendKeys(\"{SCROLLLOCK}{SCROLLLOCK}\");Start-Sleep -Seconds 60}"

5. Give it any name you like and hit Finish

macOS

This method runs a shell script on login that uses a tool called cliclick to move the mouse one pixel left and right every minute. This is such a small and fast movement that it's usually not noticeable unless you're really looking for it.

1. Install cliclick from the project website or via brew (brew install cliclick)
2. Create a script called jiggle with the following contents:

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#!/bin/sh
while true; do
    cliclick 'm:-1,+0' 'm:+1,+0'
    sleep 60
done

1. Make the script executable (chmod +x jiggle)
2. Open System Preferences, search for "login items" and hit enter.
3. Click the + button, select the jiggle script and hit "Add". You should see it appear in the list of programs as a "Unix executable". Check the "Hide" checkbox beside it and exit.

Xorg-based Linux

Much like the macOS version above, this moves the mouse one pixel left and right every minute. If you would prefer to instead use a keyboard-based method like the above Windows version, use xdotool key Scroll_Lock twice instead of the xdotool mousemove_relative * commands in the following script. More special key names for xdotool can be found here.

1. Install xdotool (usually available via your package manager)
2. Create a script called jiggle with the following contents:

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#!/bin/sh
while true; do
    xdotool mousemove_relative --sync -- -1 0
    xdotool mousemove_relative 1 0
    sleep 60
done

1. Make the script executable (chmod +x jiggle)
2. Configure your OS to run the script at login. Usually this would be done through the desktop environment's settings or via something like systemd.

Wayland-based Linux

Some preliminary research suggests that this is possible on Wayland using ydotool as a replacement for xdotool. I don't currently run a Wayland-based setup so I can't test it. If you manage to find a solution for Wayland feel free to send it to me and I'll update the post.