I’m using the following command to screen share with a MacBook that is sleeping.
open "vnc://joel@192.168.0.25:5900"
Note: MacBook’s only support wake-on-lan under certain circumstances. I’ve found that it seems to work well for me whenever my MacBook is connected to power. You can also try opening your MacBook and it may work for a short time after that. Experiment with it a bit.
If the machine is asleep you can use the wakeonlan command to wake it up. You’ll need to install that first with brew install wakeonlan. Then you can use the following commands together.
wakeonlan AE:FF:5C:FF:A7:FF --ip=192.168.0.25
open "vnc://user@192.168.0.25:5900"
The above wakeonlan command needs both the mac address and the IP address of the machine you want to connect to.
When you open a connection to the sleeping Mac it will ask you if you want to use Standard or High Performance mode. You can also add a ?quality=high parameter to the end of the URI to specify one of those options. The options are high or standard.
Bringing it all together, I’ve got an alias in my ~/.zshrc file that connects me to my other Mac using these commands. Typing air will wake up the machine, wait a second, then connect me to the other Mac using screen sharing. Here’s the full alias.
alias air="wakeonlan AE:FF:5C:FF:A7:FF --ip=192.168.0.25;sleep 1;open \"vnc://joel@192.168.0.25:5900/?quality=high\""
Written by Joel Dare on February 13, 2025. Last updated on April 9, 2025.
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