The finger contact requirement seems rather logical when you consider that it's a touchpad, why bother processing force inputs when there's no touch?

> 3rd party application to keep your computer from falling asleep

Settings -> Desktop & Dock -> Hot corners -> set one to "Disable Screen Saver"

Then just shove your cursor into that corner whenever you want to leave your computer without it sleeping

> 3rd party application to keep your computer from falling asleep

Type `caffeinate` into the terminal, your mac will stay awake until you ctrl+c it

It's a lot more fiddly than that.

I remember trying a bunch until finding some combination that worked, and looking around it sounds like it's still a common issue:

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/475477/caffeinate-...

for personal use i created a LaunchDaemon to keep `caffeinate -s` running all the time

  /Library/LaunchDaemons/ze.caffeinate.plist

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
  <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
  <plist version="1.0">
  <dict>
      <key>Label</key>
      <string>ze.caffeinate</string>
      <key>ProgramArguments</key>
      <array>
          <string>/usr/bin/caffeinate</string>
          <string>-s</string>
      </array>
      <key>KeepAlive</key>
      <true/>
  </dict>
  </plist>