A small utility. Since ~2010.
So Teams, Slack, and friends don't show you as "Away" while you're on a call or thinking. That's the whole product.
~100 lines of code. No accounts. No telemetry. No paywall.
Or skip the download — there's a one-liner.
Features
Presses a key (or moves the mouse a zero-pixel distance) every 10 seconds. Has done this since ~2010. The name is the same as the thing it does.
It's a key tap. It does nothing else for the other 9.99 seconds out of every 10. There is genuinely nothing to optimize.
It doesn't know what platform you're on. Any presence detector that looks for keyboard or mouse activity will register the tap. Teams, Slack, Zoom, Webex, Meet, whatever comes next.
Zero server contact. We don't have a server. We don't have an analytics provider. We have a GitHub repo, and that's the whole back-end.
Two slots: "auto-off in N hours" (Duration) or "auto-off at a specific time" (Absolute). Click to arm. Daily auto-rearms.
If the scheduler auto-offed NeverAway and you come back, it re-arms automatically when you unlock. If you manually paused it, that was a choice; Resume is on you.
Pricing
No tiers. No per-device licensing. No "Pro" lock screen. No subscription. The source code is on GitHub; if we vanish, you can build it yourself.
Want to throw money at this?
Please don't. Send it to the EFF instead — they protect the digital rights free software like this depends on.
Donate to EFF →There's no NeverAway donate button. The project exists either way. =)
Install
Drag, double-click, done. Lives in your tray (Windows) or menu bar (Mac) with a Pause button and an auto-off scheduler.
Unzip. Double-click NeverAway.app.
Don't even want a binary?
Your computer can already do this. Paste one of these in a terminal, ctrl-C when you're done. Same mechanism as the app — just without the icon. For today only, for the very low price of also free:
$k=Add-Type -MemberDefinition '[DllImport("user32.dll")]public static extern void keybd_event(byte v,byte s,int f,int e);' -Name N -Namespace W -PassThru;while($true){$k::keybd_event(0x87,0,2,0);Start-Sleep 10}caffeinate -d -i -u bash -c 'while true; do swift -e "import CoreGraphics; let p = CGEvent(source: nil)!.location; CGEvent(mouseEventSource: nil, mouseType: .mouseMoved, mouseCursorPosition: p, mouseButton: .left)?.post(tap: .cghidEventTap)"; sleep 10; done'Why?
Because the fix is genuinely 100 lines of code, and showing as Away on a call you're actually paying attention to is annoying. Why wouldn't I just help you out? =P
NeverAway has been free since ~2010. The license is permissive, the source is on GitHub, and if for some reason this site vanishes, you can clone the repo and rebuild it yourself. That's the whole point of open source.
If you find it useful and feel the urge to throw money at the maintainer: please redirect it to the EFF instead. They protect the digital rights free software like this depends on. The project exists either way; nobody needs to be paid for it.