Awake

Standalone system tray utility to prevent Windows from sleeping.

A lightweight .NET 9 Windows tray utility inspired by PowerToys Awake. Uses Bootstrap cup-hot / cup-hot-fill icons for active/off tray state.

Features

• Keep awake indefinitely — prevents system sleep
• Keep screen on — optional display prevention checkbox
• Start at login — toggles HKCU registry Run key
• System tray — left-click or right-click context menu, state indicators, Explorer restart resilience
• Single instance — duplicate launches show a warning
• Single-file publish — framework-dependent Awake.exe with app assemblies bundled

Building

Prerequisites

• .NET 9 SDK to build
• .NET 9 Desktop Runtime on machines that run the framework-dependent publish
• Windows 10/11 for runtime tray behavior

Build

dotnet build

Test

dotnet run --project Awake.Tests/Awake.Tests.csproj

Publish

dotnet publish Awake.csproj -c Release -r win-x64 --self-contained false

The published executable is written to:

bin/Release/net9.0-windows/win-x64/publish/Awake.exe

Release publish is single-file and framework-dependent. The target machine still needs the .NET 9 Desktop Runtime installed.

Usage

Launch Awake.exe. It sits in the system tray. Left-click or right-click the icon for the menu.

Action	Description
Keep awake indefinitely	Toggle system sleep prevention
Keep screen on	Also prevent display from turning off (disabled when awake is off)
Start at login	Auto-start with Windows via HKCU\...\Run\Awake
Exit	Cleanly stops sleep prevention and exits

Architecture

App/
├── Program.cs Entry, single-instance guard, startup diagnostics
├── TrayApplicationContext.cs WinForms NotifyIcon, menu, hidden tray host window
├── WindowsPowerStateApplier.cs SetThreadExecutionState adapter
├── WindowsStartupRegistry.cs HKCU Run key adapter
├── ProcessExecutablePathProvider.cs
├── MutexSingleInstanceLock.cs
└── AwakeIcons.cs Embedded active/off icon loading
Awake.Core/
├── TrayShellController.cs Tray state, menu projection, command handling
├── StartupManager.cs Startup registry boundary
├── SingleInstanceGuard.cs
├── StartupDiagnostics.cs
└── AwakeIconIdentity.cs
Awake.Tests/
└── Program.cs Lightweight behavior test runner

Icons

Icon source SVGs are checked in from Bootstrap Icons:

• Assets/bootstrap-cup-hot.svg
• Assets/bootstrap-cup-hot-fill.svg

Generated ICOs are multi-size Windows icon files:

• Assets/awake-off.ico
• Assets/awake-on.ico

To regenerate the ICOs from the SVG sources:

tmpdir=$(mktemp -d)
npm install --silent --prefix "$tmpdir" sharp
NODE_PATH="$tmpdir/node_modules" node tools/render-bootstrap-icons.mjs
rm -rf "$tmpdir"

Manual Windows Smoke Test

Before release, verify on Windows 10/11:

• Start Awake.exe; it appears in the notification area and no main window/taskbar window appears.
• Left-click and right-click both open the same tray menu.
• The menu spacing, typography, separators, checkmarks, disabled Keep screen on state, and active/off icons look clean at normal DPI.
• Toggle Keep awake indefinitely; the tray icon and tooltip change to active.
• Toggle Keep screen on while Awake is active; then turn Awake off and confirm screen-on clears and disables.
• Toggle Start at login and confirm HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\Awake is created/removed.
• Launch a second copy and confirm it shows the Awake is already running. warning without disrupting the first process.
• Restart Explorer and confirm the tray icon reappears and still opens the menu.
• Choose Exit and confirm the tray icon disappears and power-prevention state clears.

You can record the visual and lifecycle checks with:

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File tools\windows-smoke-test.ps1

The script writes records\topics\2026-06-13-dotnet9-tray-rewrite\manual-windows-smoke.txt.

License

MIT