Mouse jiggler alternative for Mac (invisible, no dongle)

Mouse jigglers work. That is about the best thing you can say about them. If you want something that does the same job without a USB dongle, without your cursor drifting across the screen, and without looking obvious on a video call, there is a cleaner approach.

What a mouse jiggler does, and its downsides

A hardware mouse jiggler plugs into a USB port and sends tiny mouse movements to your computer at regular intervals. A software version does the same thing by moving your cursor on a timer. Either way, the goal is to prevent your system from going idle.

The problems are easy to spot once you use one:

• Your cursor visibly moves. On a hardware jiggler it drifts slowly. On a software one it jumps. Either way it is noticeable, especially on a video call or when sharing your screen.
• It fights you while you work. Tiny unexpected cursor shifts are annoying when you are trying to click precisely.
• A USB dongle is one more thing. It takes up a port, you have to remember it, and it looks suspicious hanging out of your laptop.
• It only prevents sleep, not presence status. A jiggler keeps your screen on, but it does not guarantee every chat app reads you as active (it depends on how aggressively the app polls for input).

A software alternative that is actually invisible

Stay Green takes a different approach. Instead of moving your cursor visibly, it resets the system idle timer using two things: a single synthetic F15 keypress (a key that does nothing visible on any standard Mac app) and a zero-distance mouse move (position stays the same - no drift, nothing on screen).

The result is identical from the system's perspective: the idle timer resets, your Mac considers you active. But from your perspective, nothing happens. No cursor movement. No visual artifact. No one on your video call sees anything.

Stay Green runs as a menu bar app with no Dock icon, so it is discreet by default.

Smarter than a jiggler

The difference is not just cosmetic. Stay Green is designed to be intelligent rather than mechanical:

• Auto-pause. When you have genuinely been away for an extended period (not just stepped away briefly), Stay Green pauses itself. You will not show as active at midnight or over a weekend.
• Scheduling. You can set active hours, so it only runs during your workday.
• Privacy. Stay Green reads nothing, logs no keystrokes, and never looks at your screen. Everything stays on your Mac - the only outbound traffic is an update check and a license check.
• Keeps chat status green, not just the screen on. Because it resets the system idle timer, every presence-aware app (Teams, Slack, Zoom, Discord) reads you as active at once. A mouse jiggler does not always achieve this reliably for all apps.

Hardware vs Stay Green

No dongle to lose, no battery, no cursor drift. For the same outcome as a jiggler but without the rough edges, Stay Green is the straightforward replacement.

For a deeper look at how this compares to other categories of tools, see Stay Green vs mouse jigglers, keep-awake apps and cloud tools. Or if your main goal is keeping a specific chat app green: keep Microsoft Teams green on Mac.