From Caffeine

What is Caffeine?

Caffeine is a tiny cup of coffee that sits idly in your system tray waiting for you to click it. Once you do, it instantly fills up with fresh coffee - keeping your computer awake!

No, really. What is Caffeine?

Caffeine is a system applet that allows the user to temporarily inhibit both the screensaver and the sleep power saving mode, simply by clicking on it. This could be useful for example when watching long flash videos or playing certain full screen games that don't inhibit the screensaver by themselves.

Originally, Caffeine was written and distributed under a closed-source license, for Mac only. Our program has no affiliation with the creators of that Caffeine at all (although the creator of the first version of Caffeine for Linux did get permission from the author of the Mac version to use the name "Caffeine"). We have simply created a free port for Linux.

Caffeine is written in Python, and while it is using the GTK toolkit for the user interface, it can be run regardless of what desktop environment is being used - as long as it is being run on a GNU/Linux powered computer.

Is that all it does?

No, not quite. Caffeine's strength lies in the fact that it tries to automagically figure out what screensaver and power saving application is being used, thus acting as a simplifying abstraction layer for the user.

For information on what features are currently in Caffeine, and what features to expect in upcoming versions, go check out our Roadmap.