Lock your keys. Wipe them clean.
A small, dark, cross-platform app that disables your keyboard for as long as you
ask it to — so you can actually clean a laptop keyboard without typing a page of
jjjjjjj into whatever was open.
English · Deutsch
Cleaning a keyboard is a two-minute job that every operating system makes annoying. You wipe a laptop's keys and you have opened seventeen menus, renamed a file, sent a half-written message and turned the volume to maximum.
Keyboard Lock covers your screens, swallows every keystroke for a duration you choose, and gives your keyboard back automatically. Your mouse keeps working the whole time, so you are never trapped.
- Timed locks from 10 seconds to an hour, with one-tap presets and a slider.
- Three ways out, always: the timer runs out, you press your unlock shortcut, or you hold the on-screen button with the mouse.
- A second thought before long locks. Anything at or above 5 minutes asks you to hold a button to confirm, and reminds you of the unlock shortcut first. The threshold is configurable, including off.
- Every display covered. Plug a monitor in mid-lock and it gets covered too.
- Optional system-shortcut grabbing so a stray swipe cannot quit an app, switch windows or change the volume.
- 12 languages, following your system locale out of the box.
- Dark by design, with five accent colours.
- Nothing to trust. No network access, no runtime dependencies, no key logging, one settings file on disk. See SECURITY.md.
Grab the build for your platform from the latest release.
| Platform | Download | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| macOS | .dmg (Apple Silicon and Intel) |
Also available as .zip |
| Windows | .exe installer, or the portable .exe |
x64 and arm64 |
| Linux | .AppImage, .deb or .rpm |
chmod +x the AppImage before running it |
The release builds are unsigned — here is how to open them anyway
Code-signing certificates cost money per year, and this is a free app. The builds come straight out of a public GitHub Actions run you can inspect, but your OS does not know that.
macOS — right-click the app and choose Open, then Open again in the dialog. If macOS refuses outright:
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/Keyboard Lock.app"Windows — SmartScreen shows "Windows protected your PC". Click More info, then Run anyway.
Linux — nothing special, just make the AppImage executable:
chmod +x Keyboard-Lock-*.AppImageIf you would rather not trust a binary at all, build it yourself — it takes one command.
Pick a duration, press Lock keyboard, wipe. That is the whole app.
| Action | How |
|---|---|
| Start a lock | Choose a duration, then Lock keyboard |
| Confirm a long lock | Hold Hold to confirm for 2 seconds |
| Unlock early — keyboard | Ctrl + Alt + U (rebindable) |
| Unlock early — mouse | Hold Hold to unlock for 1.5 seconds |
| Let it end by itself | Do nothing; the ring runs out |
The unlock shortcut works on every keyboard layout, because it is matched against the physical key position as well as the character it produces.
Pick a duration |
Think twice about long locks |
Make it yours |
The lock is built out of ordinary, reversible pieces — and that is a deliberate design decision, not a shortcut:
- A frameless, always-on-top window is placed over every display at the screen-saver window level, so it sits above the menu bar, the taskbar and other fullscreen apps.
- The overlay takes keyboard focus and discards every key event before it reaches the page, so nothing you press goes anywhere. If another app steals focus, the overlay takes it back.
- While the lock runs, the app asks the OS to reserve common system shortcuts (quit, window switching, media keys) so they do nothing either.
- Your unlock combination is the one chord that is checked rather than discarded.
Nothing is installed into the input stack: no driver, no kernel extension, no global OS hook, no accessibility permission. The consequence is the important part — there is no state to get stuck in. Force-quit the app, log out, or pull the power, and your keyboard is simply working again.
Being honest about the edges matters more than a longer feature list:
- A few shortcuts belong to the OS and cannot be taken. Ctrl+Alt+Del on Windows, force-quit on macOS, and some compositor shortcuts on Linux will always work. That is a safety property of your operating system, and it is a good one.
- Wayland limits what any app can grab. On GNOME or KDE under Wayland the overlay still covers the screen and swallows keys sent to it, but reserving global shortcuts may quietly fail. The app tells you when that happens instead of pretending otherwise.
- It does not disable the keyboard at the hardware level. If you need the keys electrically dead — for a deep clean with liquid, say — power the machine off.
- It is not a security lock. It stops accidents, not people. Use your OS screen lock for that.
The interface follows your system language, and you can override it in the settings.
Deutsch |
日本語 |
English · Deutsch · Français · Español · Italiano · Português (BR) · Nederlands · Polski · Русский · Türkçe · 日本語 · 简体中文
Missing yours? docs/TRANSLATING.md walks through adding one — it is a single JSON file and two lines of registration.
| Setting | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Language | Follow system | Overrides the detected locale |
| Accent | Indigo | Five colours for the dark theme |
| Unlock shortcut | Ctrl+Alt+U |
Needs at least two modifiers, so a cloth cannot hit it |
| Ask before long locks | From 5 min | The hold-to-confirm step; can be set to 2/5/10/15 min or off |
| Unlock with the mouse | On | The hold-to-unlock button on the overlay |
| Block system shortcuts | On | Reserves quit, window switching and media keys while locked |
| Keep the display awake | On | Stops the screen sleeping mid-lock |
| Chime when a lock ends | On | A short synthesised two-note tone |
Settings live in one JSON file:
- macOS —
~/Library/Application Support/Keyboard Lock/settings.json - Windows —
%APPDATA%\Keyboard Lock\settings.json - Linux —
~/.config/Keyboard Lock/settings.json
A corrupt or hand-edited file cannot lock you out: values are validated on read, and an unusable unlock shortcut falls back to the default.
Node 20.19 or newer. No native modules, so no build toolchain to install.
git clone https://github.com/sayedmahmod/keyboard-lock.git
cd keyboard-lock
npm ci
npm run devnpm test # unit tests
npm run lint # ESLint
npm run typecheck # both TypeScript projects
npm run dist # installers for your platform, into dist/The app icon (npm run icons) and the screenshots in this README
(npm run screenshots) are both generated from source — the icon by a small
signed-distance-field rasteriser, the screenshots by capturing the real built UI.
Neither is a hand-drawn asset that can drift out of date.
src/
├── main/ Electron main process: windows, the lock, IPC, settings
├── preload/ The single, typed bridge exposed to the renderers
├── renderer/ Two windows — the setup card and the lock overlay
└── shared/ Pure logic: durations, accelerators, settings validation, i18n
src/shared imports neither Electron nor the DOM, which is what makes the parts
that matter — can this lock end, is this shortcut usable, is this duration sane —
testable in isolation.
Pull requests welcome. CONTRIBUTING.md has the setup, the commands and the one rule that outranks everything else: a user must always be able to get their keyboard back.
- Found a bug? Open an issue
- Security report? SECURITY.md
- Adding a language? docs/TRANSLATING.md
MIT © Keyboard Lock Contributors
Built with Electron, TypeScript and no runtime dependencies.