Timers and alarms

Type a duration anywhere in the palette and the first row offers a timer. 25m, 1h30, 90 seconds, 1:30. Return starts it.

For anything more, type timer and a space.

Alarms

Inside timer mode, type a time rather than a duration: 7:30, 7:30am, 19:00. Two rows appear: once, or every weekday. The alarm survives quitting the app, and one whose time passed while the Mac was asleep rolls forward to its next occurrence rather than firing a backlog.

When it goes off

A panel appears above every other window, plays a sound, and offers snooze for five, ten or thirty minutes alongside Stop. It chimes every four seconds for about a minute and then stops on its own.

This is deliberate. A notification banner disappears after a few seconds and is exactly as good as no alarm at all if you were looking somewhere else.

Managing them

timer with nothing typed lists everything running: timers with their remaining time, alarms with their time and repeat pattern. Return on a row cancels it.

From a script

open "cleat://timer?q=25m"
open -g "cleat://timers"

Why the durations parse the way they do

1h30 means an hour and a half, not an hour and thirty hours. A bare number is minutes, so 25 is twenty five minutes. A colon means clock notation, so 1:30 is ninety seconds in a timer and half past one in an alarm. A duration only offers a timer when the whole query is a duration, so 12 km to mi and 3 weeks from friday are left to the converter and the date math.

Alarms said in words

alarm 7am, alarm at 7:30, alarm for 6 and wake me at 7 all set an alarm; the timer row no longer comes first when the text reads as a clock time. With the alarm keyword a bare hour is enough. sleep in 30 min, sleep 45 or sleep after 1h starts a timer that puts the Mac to sleep when it fires instead of ringing; it shows under timer and can be cancelled there.

Pomodoro

pomodoro starts a 25-minute focus timer; when it rings, a 5-minute break starts by itself. pomodoro 50 is a longer block with a 10-minute break. Both show under timer and can be cancelled there.

When it rings

The panel with Stop and Snooze opens on the display where the pointer is, above every other window, and the chime repeats every four seconds for a minute. While a timer runs, the soonest one counts down beside the clock in the menu bar (Pomodoro 12:34), and the menu lists every timer and alarm; Settings › Extras › Menu bar turns the countdown off. While it rings the menu bar shows a bell with the timer’s name and its menu has a Stop item, the dashboard shows a red chip that stops it, and macOS gets a notification, which asks for permission the first time. So a timer that rang while you were on another display or away is still there in Notification Center.