pawse.
A cat-proof keyboard lock for Windows.
One click - or a hotkey - freezes the keyboard so a cat walking across it can't close your work, fire off shortcuts, or leave a modifier stuck. The days of your cat force-pushing to main are over. Unlock it deliberately: a chord, a passphrase, a hold-to-unlock button, or an auto-timer.
What Pawse does
One-click lock
Click the tray paw or hit your hotkey. A global hook swallows every physical key while locked - typing, shortcuts, F-keys - and clears any modifier the cat left stuck.
Cat-proof by design
The unlock chord has to be the only keys held, so a cat sprawled across half the keyboard can't stumble into it. While locked, the tray paw needs a deliberate double-click.
Unlock your way
A keyboard chord, a typed passphrase, a hold-to-unlock button, or an automatic timer - each one toggleable, and at least one always kept working.
Lives in the tray
No window in your way - a paw in the system tray (green unlocked, red locked) and a small floating popup while locked, on one display, several, or all of them. Move it, dim it, or switch it off.
Your keyboard, not the screen one
On-screen and touch keyboards keep typing while the hardware keyboard is frozen - handy for wiping the keys down. One setting blocks those too.
Local unless you ask
No telemetry, no phone-home, and no connection at all until you press Check now in Settings. Updates have three levels - ask only, tell me, or install for me - and the first is the default. Settings, log and keystrokes stay on the machine.
Unlocking
Four ways in, each switched on or off in Settings. Whatever you turn off, Pawse keeps at least one working method enabled - a lock you couldn't undo would be worse than no lock.
Also in Settings: block the mouse too, block Win+L and the browser / calculator / media keys while locked, start Pawse at sign-in, and lock the moment it starts.
Download
Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit. Not sure which? Take the all-in-one installer - it carries everything and asks you nothing. Nothing here needs administrator rights unless you choose to install for every account on the PC.
Or stay portable
Pawse.exe. Self-contained; settings and log live in the same folder.
Pawse-x.y.z-min.zip~0.3 MB
The small launcher. Needs the .NET 8 Desktop Runtime installed once.
Already have Pawse? Settings → About → Check now offers the new version and installs it for you - that's the only time Pawse goes online, unless you move the update setting up a level. It checks GitHub for the newest release and cross-checks the download's checksum against pawse.at. Every release is built and published by CI, with a SHA256SUMS.txt covering all five downloads. Windows may mark a downloaded file as blocked - if an exe won't start, right-click it (or the zip) → Properties → Unblock first. Installing or uninstalling asks a running Pawse to quit properly, so anything it blocked is always put back.
What it can't block
A keyboard hook is not a kernel driver, and pretending otherwise would be the wrong kind of confidence. Four things stay out of reach:
Ctrl+Alt+Del
Reserved by Windows below any hook. Only a signed kernel driver could touch it, which is out of scope.
Windows running as administrator
An elevated window won't take input from an unelevated hook. Restart Pawse as administrator from the tray if you need that.
Touch and pen
Even with mouse blocking on, native touch reaches pointer-aware apps through a pipeline no mouse hook sees. On a touchscreen, taps still land.
Simulated keystrokes
Windows says a keystroke was simulated, never which program did it - so while on-screen keyboards are allowed, macro tools can type too. One setting shuts both out.
And if Pawse itself dies, the lock dies with it: Windows drops the hook and the keyboard is yours again. Anything it switched on at the OS level is reverted on unlock, on quit, and swept on the next start if it was killed outright.