Kleanly

Kleanly is a small macOS utility that lives in your MacBook's notch and does one job extremely well: it lets you clean your Mac without shutting it down. You hover the Kleanly control beside your MacBook notch and press play to start cleaning, and with just a tap the app disables your keyboard and trackpad. When you are finished, you double-tap your trackpad to exit. Kleanly presents itself as the way to clean your MacBook like you always wanted to, and it is built for people who keep their machines spotless — users who clean their keyboard and display regularly and want that routine to be elegant, safe and non-intrusive. Cleaning a keyboard while the Mac is powered on has always been awkward. As the product itself asks: ever tried cleaning your keyboard without turning off your Mac? The screen ends up a mess, doesn't it? Every wipe risks registering a press, which means you can send random messages or trigger shortcuts you never intended. The only alternative used to be shutting the Mac down completely, which interrupts whatever you were doing and stops you from watching or listening while you clean. Kleanly removes that trade-off. Rather than powering the machine off, it temporarily disables input so the Mac stays on and useful while you clean, and no stray keystroke reaches any application. That is the problem Kleanly was built around, and it matters because cleaning is something MacBook owners do repeatedly, not once. The core of Kleanly is the notch control. Kleanly lives in your MacBook's notch, and hovering that control and pressing play is what starts a cleaning session. With just a tap, your keyboard and trackpad are locked, so pressing keys or swiping the trackpad has no effect at all. Double-tapping the trackpad is the single gesture that ends the session and restores normal input, so there is no menu to dig through and nothing complicated to remember. Kleanly calls the result peace of mind: no more worrying about sending random messages or triggering shortcuts while cleaning, so you can focus on making your Mac spotless instead of watching what you might accidentally click. For the display, Kleanly can show a full-screen black overlay on your screen. A black surface exposes all the dirt, fingerprints and smudges that a bright or busy wallpaper would hide, which makes it far easier to see exactly where the screen still needs wiping. The black overlay is a separate choice from the input lock, so you can turn it on only when it is time to clean the display and leave it off while you are only wiping down the keys. Two features added since the first launch extend the same idea further. Keep Watching While You Clean means your screen stays on, so a video keeps playing while you wipe down the keys — you do not lose your place, and you do not have to pause what you were watching just to tidy up. Toddler-Proof applies the input lock to small children: let the little ones watch a cartoon, and taps, slaps and swipes on the keyboard or trackpad do nothing until you double-tap to exit. Both features rely on the same locked-input state that Kleanly already creates for cleaning. Kleanly also handles Macs and displays that have no notch. On those machines, Kleanly sits as a small tab in the menu bar instead, so the same one-tap cleaning flow is still available. For minimalists, the notch control can be tucked out of sight between cleanings, and the app promises a minimalistic intuitive interface — a minimal design that stays out of your way, with no extra windows and no unnecessary clicks. Overall the workflow is deliberately simple. A control parks beside the MacBook notch, or appears as a small tab in the menu bar on displays without a notch. You press play once to begin, Kleanly locks the keyboard and trackpad so input is ignored, and you optionally switch on the black overlay if you are cleaning the screen. When you are done, double-tapping the trackpad ends the session and normal typing resumes. New since the first launch are the notch control itself, in-app updates, the ability to move your license to a new Mac yourself, and the small tab on displays without a notch. The benefits follow directly from that approach. You no longer have to choose between a clean keyboard and a Mac that stays on, because the machine keeps running while input is suppressed. You stop worrying about firing off random messages or triggering shortcuts mid-wipe, which is the peace of mind Kleanly promises. You can keep watching a video while cleaning the keys. You can see fingerprints and smudges clearly thanks to the black overlay. And you can hand the MacBook to a child without taps, slaps and swipes doing anything until you double-tap to exit. Concrete use cases come straight out of the product's own description. One is routine keyboard cleaning: you hover the Kleanly control, press play, wipe down the keys, and double-tap the trackpad when finished — all while a video keeps playing. Another is display cleaning, where the full-screen black overlay exposes dirt, fingerprints and smudges so you can target them. A third is letting a toddler watch a cartoon with the keyboard and trackpad locked, so nothing gets typed no matter how hard the keys are pressed. A fourth is cleaning on a Mac or display without a notch, where Kleanly sits as a small tab in the menu bar and provides the same one-tap flow. Kleanly requires macOS 12 (Monterey) or greater, and Macs with an Intel chip are supported. It is sold through Gumroad at $14.99 USD, with 58 sales recorded at the time of writing, 4 ratings and a 5-star average from those ratings. The creator is Haider Nawaz, who has a creator rating of 4.9 from 12 verified reviews across 2 other products. Reviewers describe it as easy, practical and useful, and as an app that does exactly what it says while being surprisingly well designed compared with earlier keyboard-cleaning tools that were ugly or intrusive. In short, Kleanly's value proposition is narrow and clear: one tap in the notch locks your keyboard and trackpad so you can clean your MacBook properly while it keeps running, and a double-tap on the trackpad brings everything back to normal.