Lock.app

Locks your Mac

Intro

A simple Mac application that does only one thing ----> It locks your Mac!

Installation

1. Download the image
2. Open it
3. Move Lock app to your Applications folder
4. In case of Big Sur you might need to enable Preferences -> Security & Privacy -> Accessibility and check the checkbox next to the Terminal App

Background

Was using Alftred app for multiple years and recently realised that from all of it's features and fancy configuration I have set up long time ago I was using exactly nothing. I was still using it every day, but just for two things:

1. opening a application (mainly iTerm and Chrome)
2. Locking my machine whenever I was leaving

So the first thing regular Spotlight can do as well, for my new setup I decided on the minimalist approach. After a week or so I realised that I can't get used to locking with ⌘⌃Q and hot corners are not a solution, but a problem by themselves.

Instead of switching back to Alfread I decided to create a simple application that is just locking the machine when it is triggered and name it Lock this way Spotlight should be able to find it and suggest you it whenever you are typing Lock hopefully already on the first letters.

Default ways

The default way to lock your macOS Mojave machine is Command+Control+Q

for more options there is a detailed list on macpaw

Locking from Command-line

The core of this app is a simple one line call to one of MacOS core services and if you spend most of your time in the command-line you can just create a alias for it within your shell configuration (~/.bashrc, ~/zshrc ...)

alias lock='/System/Library/CoreServices/"Menu Extras"/User.menu/Contents/Resources/CGSession -suspend'

Known issues

Spotlight does not learn from your actions like Alfred does - if you have multiple applications with lock in their name or description the lock app might not come up in the first place.

Development

Clone the repo:

git clone [email protected]:duksis/Lock

After making changes install the development version locally:

cp -Rv Lock/Lock.app /Applications/

Releasing

1. run scripts/bump_version NEW.VERSION.NUMBER
2. push your changes
3. create a new release

License

Lock.app is released under the MIT License.