Disabling the screensaver on OSX

I often find the need to quickly disable the screensaver on OSX however it requires that you open the System Preferences/Desktop & Screen Saver/Screen Saver and select to “Start screen saver: Never”. Now I realize that this isn’t a particularly difficult undertaking but recently it became just annoying enough to drive me to google for an alternative.

To my surprise I found a brilliantly simple tool called Caffeine. Caffeine is a tiny program that puts an icon in the menubar. Click it to prevent your Mac from automatically going to sleep, dimming the screen or starting screen savers. Click it again to go back. Hold down the Command key while clicking to show the menu. The menu now has a sub-menu for deactivating Caffeine automatically after a number of minutes.

I espcially liked Caffeine because it offers the ability to disable the screensaver when the program is started. This is great because I can create a simple shorcut key to start Caffeine and then the screensaver is immediately disabled. The other features it offers are interesting although I haven’t found a use for them. I would be interested in hearing about how others use Caffeine. One other useful feature is that you can simply click the icon in the menubar and it will disable/enable Caffeine.