Caffeine Applet for COSMIC DE

A third-party applet for the COSMIC desktop that prevents your system from going idle. Not official COSMIC software and not endorsed by System76. Left-click the coffee icon to toggle an inhibit lock that blocks idle and sleep, keeping your screen on and your machine awake. Right-click for a menu to inhibit for a set time.

Uses the logind D-Bus Inhibit interface directly — no child processes, no PID files, crash-safe by design. Works on any system running systemd-logind or elogind.

Features

• Left-click toggle: Left-click the panel icon to switch the inhibit lock on or off indefinitely.
• Timed sessions: Right-click for a menu to inhibit for 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, or indefinitely.
• Status icon: The panel icon reflects the current state, a steaming cup when active and an empty cup when idle.
• Auto-expiry: Timed sessions release the inhibit lock on their own when time's up — no need to remember to turn it off.
• Crash-safe: Uses a file descriptor–based inhibit lock. If the applet crashes, the OS automatically releases the lock.
• Minimal: No background processes, no polling, near-zero resource usage.
• Distro-agnostic: Works with systemd-logind and elogind.

Installation

Flatpak (recommended)

Available via System76's official COSMIC Flatpak repository (not Flathub — this applet doesn't have a standalone window/use outside a panel, which is outside Flathub's scope).

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists --user cosmic https://apt.pop-os.org/cosmic/cosmic.flatpakrepo
flatpak install --user cosmic com.github.codevardhan.caffeine-applet

If you have COSMIC Store installed, it should also be visible there under the COSMIC Applets category, provided you have both the flathub and cosmic remotes added at user scope. System-scope remotes currently don't surface applets correctly in COSMIC Store (pop-os/cosmic-store#477), so if it isn't showing up, add both as --user remotes and it should appear.

From source

A justfile is included for the casey/just command runner.

git clone https://github.com/codevardhan/caffeine-applet.git
cd caffeine-applet
just build-release
sudo just install

Then add the applet to a panel in Settings → Desktop → Panel → Configure panel applets.

Uninstall

# Flatpak
flatpak uninstall --user com.github.codevardhan.caffeine-applet

# Native
sudo just uninstall
# or manually:
sudo rm /usr/bin/caffeine-applet
sudo rm /usr/share/applications/com.github.codevardhan.caffeine-applet.desktop
sudo rm /usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/apps/com.github.codevardhan.caffeine-applet*.svg
sudo rm /usr/share/metainfo/com.github.codevardhan.caffeine-applet.metainfo.xml

Log out and back in for COSMIC settings to update.

Packaging

If packaging for a Linux distribution, vendor dependencies locally and build with vendored sources:

just vendor
just build-vendored
just rootdir=debian/caffeine-applet prefix=/usr install

Translators

Fluent is used for localization. Translation files are in the i18n directory. New translations may copy the English (en) localization, rename en to the desired ISO 639-1 language code, and provide translations for each message identifier.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Feel free to open an issue or submit a pull request. For major changes, please open an issue first to discuss what you would like to change.

License

MPL-2.0