I have been wanting to do this for a long time, since about the time I received and configured my new MacBook Esc at work. That’s probably half a year ago.

I have always used a blank screen saver on my Macs. But since some releases back of macOS (OS X really) Apple no longer ships the OS with an blank alternative.

Why a screen saver you may ask, why not just turn off the display (lock the computer)? External monitors is my answer to that. External monitors take ages to start from wake and that is not an alternative when you SHOULD lock your computer each time you leave your desk.

So there are alternatives for this. The probably most used one is a black screen saver made by Dr. Lex. This one works just great but is from my knowledge not open-source and is huge (7KiB compressed 😉)!

Another way to come around this problem can be found on superuser.com. That also works great and feels better than downloading a binary from Dr. Lex. But the installation process is a little bit bulky so I wasn’t 100% pleased.

So this week I took the superuser.com alternative and made it ever smaller (1KiB!) and put it on GitHub. The file is still an binary (a plist) but can be opened with Graphics Tools for Xcode. As close to open-source as I can get. To make the installation easier I made a brew cask tap.

The installation is almost too easy if you have brew installed already.

  • Run:
brew tap theseal/blank-screensaver
brew cask install blank-screensaver
  • Activate the screen saver in the Desktop & Screen saver prefPane.

Enjoy!

And as always, patches are welcome. 🙂