Keep Teams green.
A friendly little tray app that quietly keeps your Microsoft Teams presence Available — and your machine awake — without leaving you parked on a fake screensaver.
Verify your download (optional)
Hash the file and compare to the matching line in SHA256SUMS.txt on the release page:
(Get-FileHash -Algorithm SHA256 noidle.msi).Hash.ToLower()For cryptographic verification with cosign, see SIGNING.md.
Interactive demo
Interactive demonstration: a Windows 11 taskbar showing the noidle tray icon with a green presence dot. Right-clicking the icon opens the control menu.
Three small things, every minute or so.
No visible cursor jumps. No screensaver hacks. No telemetry. Just enough OS-level activity to keep the same idle counter Teams reads from looking fresh.
Tells Windows you're here
A sub-pixel mouse nudge and an invisible keypress — nothing you'd see or feel. The OS registers both as user activity and resets the idle timer.
Keeps the screen awake
Tells Windows to keep the display and system awake — the same signal your video player sends. No changes to power settings. Reverts the instant you quit.
Verifies it took
Reads back the same idle counter Teams checks. If the nudge didn't take, it logs a warning instead of silently lying to you.
A friendly popup with what actually changed.
noidle parses the GitHub release notes and shows you a real "What's New" window — categorized into Added, Fixed, Changed. No silent auto-installs. No nagging.
- Three explicit choices — Download, Remind me later, Skip this version
- Skipped versions are remembered as a floor, not an exact match
- Update checks rate-limited to once every 6 hours
✨ Update available
v0.3.7 · you're running v0.3.4
- Cosign keyless signatures for every release artifact
- SHA256SUMS.txt for tamper-evidence verification
- Install-mode-aware autostart (MSI vs portable)
- Hotkey-error alert no longer silently swallowed by Focus Assist
- SHA256SUMS file was empty in v0.3.6
- Single source of truth for version in zig.__version__
When to use it. When it can't help.
Not every "Away" is something a tray app should fix. Here's the honest split.
Use noidle when… good fit
- You're at your desk reading or thinking and don't want Teams to mark you Away.
- You take long phone calls in front of your laptop but stepped away from the keyboard.
- You want your machine to stay awake without changing Windows' power settings forever.
- You want the same behavior for Slack, Discord, and any app that uses the OS idle signal.
It can't help when… honest no
- You're on a disconnected RDP session.
- Outlook says you're in a meeting. Calendar status takes precedence over presence.
- You're on a managed work device with corporate monitoring (CrowdStrike, Sentinel, Teramind, ActivTrak — they detect synthetic input). Don't run noidle there without permission.
- Your laptop is locked (Win+L). Teams marks you Away regardless of input. By OS design.
Is this a virus? My antivirus complained.
No. With the .msi, SmartScreen is usually quieter — it's a recognized installer format and Windows treats it more leniently than a raw .exe. If you still see a warning, click More info → Run anyway.
The portable .exe is built with PyInstaller, and Windows Defender SmartScreen flags lots of PyInstaller exes by default — it's a heuristic against the wrapper format. First run, click More info → Run anyway.
You can verify the file before running it: every release ships SHA256SUMS.txt plus cosign keyless signatures. See SIGNING.md. The full source is open on GitHub.
Will my employer be able to tell I'm using it?
If your employer runs corporate endpoint monitoring (CrowdStrike, Sentinel, Teramind, ActivTrak), yes — those tools intentionally hook the Windows input pipeline and flag synthetic input. noidle makes no attempt to hide.
On a personal machine with no monitoring, no — there's no telemetry, no network calls except the once-every-6-hours update check (turn-offable in the menu), and no special API that distinguishes "real" mouse input from injected.
Does it work with Slack? Discord? Anything besides Teams?
Yes — anything that uses Windows' idle signal (most desktop apps with a presence indicator) will see your machine as active. Slack, Discord, the new Teams (WebView2), and most chat clients are covered.
It does not influence presence in browser-only tools (e.g. Slack open in a Chrome tab) since browsers track tab visibility, not OS idle. For those, leave the tab focused.
How is this different from Caffeine / Mouse Jiggler?
Caffeine just prevents sleep — it doesn't reset the input idle counter, so Teams still goes Away. Old-school mouse jigglers move the cursor visibly, which is annoying mid-click and obvious during a screen share.
noidle does both: prevents sleep AND resets the idle counter, with a sub-pixel nudge that's invisible, plus auto-pause when you're typing or screen-sharing. Free, MIT, no telemetry.
Is it free? What's the catch?
Free, MIT-licensed, no telemetry, no upsell. The only "catch" is — please don't run it on a managed work device without your IT team's blessing.
How do I uninstall it?
If you used the .msi: Settings → Apps → noidle.app → Uninstall. The installer removes the autostart registry entry for you.
If you used the portable .exe: right-click the tray icon → Quit, then delete the .exe. To also remove settings: delete %APPDATA%\noidle\ and %LOCALAPPDATA%\noidle\. Disable "Start with Windows" first so the registry entry is cleaned up.
Ready?