This is a small utility app for macOS that lives in the menu bar in the status area. Its purpose is to provide a quick way to switch settings depending on whether your laptop is docked or not.

For example, when in desktop mode I prefer my mouse not to use natural scrolling (what can I say I've been using it this way since dot) and for the dock to be shown. However, in laptop mode, I prefer natural scrolling and having my dock hidden.

I also use this for keeping my machine awake using the caffeinate built-in utility.

Sadly, in the Apple ecosystem, it seems pretty difficult to change system settings. I looked into various approaches (eg, using defaults), but the one which appeared to give the most flexibility was to use AppleScript.

A personal experiment in writing a GUI app in Rust. I do not anticipate it will be useful to many. This is intentionally a lightweight utility focused on learning rather than production robustness. I fully hope there are easier ways to perform this kind of automation because working with AppleScript is not exactly fun. Feel free to get in touch and let me know those easier ways ;-)

• Writing a macOS app in Rust, was not 'pleasant' given the heritage (Objective-C)
• system_status_bar_macos seemed like a good fit, but needed to extend it. Raised a few PRs:
  • [1/2] Extend StatusItem and MenuItem API
  • [2/2] Run rustfmt over the whole project
• Initially, the crate author seemed willing to incorporate, but they are left unmerged as of 27/04/2025 😔
• Forked graemer957/system_status_bar_macos
  • Extended StatusItem and MenuItem
  • Formatted using rustfmt
  • Substantially reduced build times (need to write up a blog post on this!)
  • Modified the event_loop! so it does not waste CPU cycles
• The AppleScripts I wrote ended up being flakey across macOS version upgrades

Simply use cargo install along with the path to this repo using the protocol you prefer, eg:

cargo install --git ssh://[email protected]/graemer957/lod --locked

Use the same command from Installing to upgrade. I have yet to find a way to perform updates on all my command line utilities installed via cargo.

Once installed, execute lod on the command line. I have some ideas on how to make the UX better, see Future Ideas below.

In ~/.config/lod/config.toml you can set:

desktop_applescript = "<AppleScript to run when switching into Desktop mode>"
laptop_applescript = "<AppleScript to run when switching into Laptop mode>"

# Optional
# caffeinate_app = "<Path to custom binary for keeping machine wake>"
# caffeinate_options = "<Options to pass to custom binary>"

You will need Rust 1.86.0 or higher.

cargo test
cargo build --release

For coverage reports and code stats, see CONTRIBUTING.md.

An incomplete list of ideas which could make this project more useful. I may get to them one day, but feel free to raise a PR if any are handy for you sooner :-)

• Launch script to start on boot
• Logging into the unified logging system
• Observability, eg crash reporting and maybe anonymous usage information
• Add tooltips or colour to the menu item(s) (this depends on enhancing system_status_bar_macos and so far the author has not merged any of my other PRs
• Triggers based on hotkeys or hardware events (insertion of mouse triggers desktop mode)
• Automatically caffeinate depending on power state
• Improve automated test coverage