notes on dantrolene ・ rx no.003 ・ for macOS
You're home
and it locks anyway.
dantrolene keeps your Mac from locking the screen while you're sitting right in front of it, on the WiFi you call home. on every other network, it locks like it should.
macOS 26 · free · open source · MIT
01 ・ the ailment
The screen locked
while you were reading it.
lock timeouts make sense on a train, in an office, anywhere a stranger might walk past. at home they're a reflex with no predator. the screen seizes up mid-paragraph, mid-movie, and asks for the password it asked an hour ago.
Dantrolene, the drug, is a muscle relaxant: it's what you give a body that clenches when it shouldn't. the app watches which WiFi you're on. on your home network it holds a display assertion, so the lock chain never starts. on any other network, nothing. the reflex stays.
it still pretends to sleep. after your usual idle time the display dims and goes dark on schedule. touch anything and the light comes back, with no password between you and the sentence you were reading.
and it's polite: when Zoom or a presentation holds its own display assertion, dantrolene notices and backs off.
plate i ・ the menu bar pill, deciding whether you're home.
02 ・ the label
Directions
for use.
a pill in the menu bar. open it, press “use current”, and that network is home. three modes: automatic, always on, off. that's everything there is to learn.
- aknows home by the network name: checked locally, stored locally.
- bsimulated sleep: dims and darkens on idle, wakes at a touch.
- cconflict-aware: backs off when another app holds the display.
- dlaunch at login, then forget it exists.
- enothing phones home. there is no home to phone but yours.
- fMIT. small enough to read in one sitting.
For the Macs
that live at home.
macOS · free · open source · rx no.003
Download Dantrolene ↓