Kitchen and Home-Gym Mode: Keep a Recipe or Workout Video Playing on Your Mac With the Keyboard and Trackpad Locked and the Screen On

The MacBook on the kitchen counter is showing a recipe video. Your hands are covered in dough. You lean in to see whether it said two tablespoons or three, your forearm brushes the trackpad, and the video is now a different video, or paused, or the browser has gone back a page. The home-gym version is the same scene with sweat instead of flour: a follow-along workout on the laptop, a hand on the edge of the keyboard to steady yourself, and a tab closed mid-set. VibeLock was built for leaving coding agents running, but the problem it solves is more general than that: keep what is on screen visible and running, and make the keyboard and trackpad ignore everything until you unlock. This post is the kitchen and home-gym setup.

Why the built-in options do not quite work

macOS gives you two tools and neither fits. The lock screen (⌃⌘Q) protects the Mac but blanks the display, which is the opposite of what you want when the whole point is to watch something. Leaving the Mac unlocked keeps the video playing but leaves every key and every corner of the trackpad live, and a kitchen is an environment of stray elbows, wet fingers and children. A tablet stand, a phone, or a “don't touch it” policy are the usual workarounds, and the laptop with the big screen stays on the desk where it is no use.

What you actually want is the middle setting: the screen on, one app visible and playing, and all input blocked. That is precisely the state VibeLock creates. It locks the keyboard, mouse and trackpad with a system-wide event tap, hides every app except the ones you allow, holds the display awake so the screen never sleeps, and unlocks with Touch ID or your Mac login password. The keep-the-screen-on post explains the mechanics; here it is applied to a counter and a yoga mat.

Setting up kitchen mode

1. Open the video first, then lock. VibeLock does not control playback; it protects whatever is already on screen. Start the recipe video in Safari, Chrome, YouTube in a browser, or the TV app, put it full screen or sized how you want it, and press play.
2. Allow the app that is playing. From the VibeLock menu bar icon, toggle the browser or video app on as an allowed app. Terminals, Claude desktop, ChatGPT and VS Code are pre-allowed because that is the app's main audience; your browser is one toggle away. Everything else, Slack, Mail, the desktop files, is hidden and kept hidden while locked, so the kitchen counter is not also showing your inbox to whoever walks past.
3. Choose “visible”, not “accessible”. VibeLock has two trust levels for allowed apps. A visible app is on screen but cannot be touched; an accessible app can be typed in while everything else stays locked, which exists for pair sessions where a colleague approves a prompt. For a video you want visible. The trust levels post covers the difference in detail.
4. Lock. Input stops, including Spotlight (⌘Space), Force Quit (⌘⌥Esc) and ⌘Q, so a stray palm cannot quit the video or summon a search box over it. The display stays awake. The video keeps playing because nothing has told it to stop.
5. Unlock with a dry finger. Touch ID first, your login password as the fallback, both verified locally through macOS. If your hands are a mess, wipe one finger; the sensor does not need the whole hand.

The honest limitation: you cannot pause

Because VibeLock blocks all input, you also cannot pause, rewind or skip while locked. For a recipe video that is a real trade-off: half the reason to have the video there is to scrub back to the bit where they folded the dough. There are two ways round it, and which you pick depends on how messy the job is.

• Unlock, scrub, relock. Touch ID takes a second. For the occasional rewind this is fine, and it is still far better than a trackpad that reacts to your sleeve.
• Use a second device as the remote. Cast or AirPlay from a phone to the Mac, or control playback from the phone's app, and leave the Mac as the locked display. What VibeLock blocks is the Mac's own keyboard, mouse and trackpad; whether a given player can be driven from a phone while the Mac is locked is a question for that player, and worth trying once before you rely on it.

For a long braise with a video that plays straight through, or a 45-minute workout that is designed to be followed without touching anything, neither matters and the lock is simply correct.

Home-gym mode

A follow-along workout has one extra hazard: you touch the laptop on purpose. People steady themselves on the desk, shift the laptop to see it from the floor, and lean in to read the timer with a hand on the keyboard. Each of those is a chance to pause the class or open a new tab. Locked, the laptop becomes a monitor that happens to have a keyboard attached, and you can grab it, angle it and prop it against the wall without consequences. Two tips from experience:

• Put the laptop where the camera would be in a studio, at roughly eye level when you are standing and visible from the mat, and lock before the warm-up starts, because the warm-up is when you are still fiddling with the position.
• If the class is in a browser, size the window before locking. Full-screen video with the browser chrome hidden is easier to read from three metres away.

If you use fullscreen apps across several Spaces, VibeLock handles that too: fullscreen windows of blocked apps stay where they are but get an opaque shield if anyone swipes to them, and your allowed apps work across all Spaces and displays, so an external monitor on the garage wall is covered.

What VibeLock is not doing here

It is worth being clear about scope, because the kitchen is a different threat model from an office. VibeLock is a lock for the ten-minute absence and the stray hand, not a security boundary against someone determined; the security model page lists exactly what it blocks and what it does not. It does not protect the Mac from a glass of water, and a MacBook next to a sink is a hardware decision VibeLock cannot help with. And it does not keep the video playing by itself: the display is held awake, but if your streaming site pauses after an hour to ask whether you are still watching, that prompt will sit there, visible and untouchable, until you unlock and click it. Autoplay settings are the streaming service's business.

It also does nothing to the sound. The Mac's volume keys are keyboard keys, so expect them to be blocked like the rest; set the level before you lock, or use the speaker's own controls if you are playing through an external one.

Why this is the same feature as leaving an agent running

The use case VibeLock started with was leaving Claude Code or another agent visibly working while you step away, the original post is still the clearest statement of it. The kitchen and the home gym are the same shape: something on screen that should keep going, a person nearby who should not be able to interfere with it, and a display that must not go dark. Once you have the app for one, the other two are a menu-bar toggle away, and a MacBook that was gathering dust on the desk during dinner becomes the biggest screen in the kitchen.

VibeLock is a native Swift menu bar app of about 2 MB, signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarized, makes no network calls, needs only the Accessibility permission, costs $10 once and runs on macOS 13 Ventura or later.