How to stop Golly napping on Mac OS 10.9+

[Andrew]

Apple introduced a new "feature" called App Nap in Mac OS 10.9. See details here:

https://developer.apple.com/library/con ... X10_9.html

This causes problems if you want to run Golly in the background and do some sort of lengthy task like generate a large pattern for many steps or run oscar.lua on a large-period oscillator. Golly will be put to sleep and performance will basically drop to nothing. The solution is to disable app napping for Golly by opening a Terminal window and typing this command (after quitting Golly):

Code: Select all

defaults write net.sourceforge.golly NSAppSleepDisabled -bool YES

The best way to put Golly in the background is to minimize its main window (so it appears in the dock) and then switch to some other app. That way Golly will never attempt to update the viewport or the status bar and so maximize the generating speed.