My desk is tiny but sometimes I want to use an external keyboard with my Mac laptop. With an external monitor connected, I want to close the laptop lid then rest the keyboard atop it. Alas, I soon found out that, unlike Windows, there was no system setting to tell the Mac to Do Nothing and stay awake. Instead, as soon as the lid closes, the Mac went to sleep. Supposedly there was some app to force the Mac to stay awake but it was no longer in development. What I have been doing is, either keep the Mac's lid open and use the external monitor as additional real estate, or jam the lid so that it wouldn't close all the way and use the second screen as a mirror of the laptop. I sometimes use a Bluetooth keyboard from Apple and it jams the lid perfectly. But there must be a better way.
By mere coincidence, I recently had my Mac laptop connected to power source, as opposed to running on the built-in battery, and closed the lid while connected to a monitor. Boom! There it is, on the glorious second screen, my Mac screen! The computer didn't go to sleep, it simply went from two screens to just one, which is fine. I can now put a full-sized keyboard, or whatever keyboard I want to use, right atop the closed laptop.
It's nice to discover things on my own, but I suppose with the correct terms to search I would eventually come across the official words from Apple:
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