The current macOS “System Settings” continues to confound me. Did you know you can prevent your mac from sleeping with a setting? I previously thought caffeinate was the only way to achieve this.
My main use case is to prevent my mac from going to sleep during slow (long) downloads (I’m downloading Sonoma beta).
The setting you want is “Prevent automatic sleeping when the display is off”, hidden somewhere in System Settings. It’s not under Energy saver, but is hidden within Displays > Advanced... Scroll to the bottom and you’ll see:
Another gripe: the setting “Turn display off when inactive” is not in Displays, nor is it in Screen saver, nor is it in Energy saver... so where is it? Lock Screen WTF?
If you do pmset -g to display power management settings, you will notice turning on “Prevent automatic sleeping when the display is off” changes sleep from 2 to 1 to prevent sleeping, whereas displaysleep and disksleep are still enabled:
System-wide power settings:
Currently in use:
standby 0
Sleep On Power Button 1
autorestart 0
powernap 1
networkoversleep 0
disksleep 10
sleep 0 (sleep prevented by bluetoothd, powerd)
ttyskeepawake 1
displaysleep 2
tcpkeepalive 1
lowpowermode 0
womp 1