Kept · getting out
That's the one that's meant to work when everything else in the app is broken. Five presses, roughly a second apart, on the locked screen. It drops the shield immediately and doesn't count against your streak.
In order. Each of these is separate code from the one above it, so a failure in one doesn't mean the rest are gone.
Three presses brings up a screen with a “Hold to break it” button. You don't need the trackpad — the button is already focused, so holding Space for three seconds does it. Holding the button with the mouse works too.
Just type it on the locked screen. It opens the same screen as above. (If you changed the escape phrase in settings, type that instead.)
Kept drops the shield on its own after a set time — two minutes by default — whatever else has gone wrong. It's a timer that runs independently of everything else, so it survives most kinds of failure.
Hold the power button until it turns off, then start it again. Kept deliberately does not survive this, and it deliberately does not relaunch itself afterwards — a reboot is always allowed to win. You'll lose unsaved work in other apps, which is why it's fourth and not first.
It may not work, and we'd rather tell you than have you press it in a panic. Kept never disables macOS's Force Quit — but the shield window sits above everything, so the Force Quit panel can open underneath it, where you can't see or click it. We're working on that. Until it's fixed, Esc five times is the one to trust.
If you had to reboot, or any of the routes above failed, we want to know — that's the most serious kind of bug this app can have, and it's the only one we can't find without you.
Useful if you have it: which routes you tried, what was on screen, and whether the app was mid-workout or mid-countdown.
A contact address goes here before anyone but the author is running this. Shipping a lockout app with nowhere to report a lockout would be the wrong way round.
Kept — friction is the product, being trapped is a defect. If you're reading this, something went wrong on our side.