teams-nudge

A tiny nudge to keep your Teams status accurate while you work quietly.

Microsoft Teams flips your status to "Away" after a few minutes without keyboard/mouse input — even if you're heads-down reading, thinking, or in a meeting off-camera. teams-nudge watches your real system idle time and, right before you'd flip to Away, sends one imperceptible input event (a 1px cursor nudge and back) to keep your presence accurate.

It does nothing while you're actually active. It only acts in the narrow window right before you'd otherwise go idle.

Install

npm install -g teams-nudge

Requires macOS. (Windows support is on the roadmap — see below.)

Usage

teams-nudge

That's it — it runs in the foreground, checking your idle time every 15 seconds by default, and nudging after 4 minutes idle.

Options:

teams-nudge --interval 10       # check idle time every 10s
teams-nudge --threshold 180     # nudge after 3 minutes idle
teams-nudge --once              # fire a single nudge immediately, then exit (useful for testing)

Config

On first run, a config file is created at ~/.teams-nudge/config.json:

{
  "checkIntervalSeconds": 15,
  "idleThresholdSeconds": 240,
  "quietHours": {
    "enabled": false,
    "start": "19:00",
    "end": "08:00"
  }
}

Set quietHours.enabled to true and adjust start/end if you want nudging to pause overnight or outside work hours.

Running in the background

To keep it running without a terminal window open, use a process manager like pm2 or a macOS launchd agent. A launchd plist example will be added in a future release.

Roadmap

• [ ] Windows support
• [ ] Menu bar app (no terminal required)
• [ ] launchd plist for auto-start on login

A note on use

This tool reflects your real idle time back to Teams a little more generously — it doesn't fabricate meetings or activity you didn't do. How that fits your company's policies is worth checking for yourself; this is a tool, not a guarantee.

License

MIT