NO MACS SLEEP IN BROOKLYN

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:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201834

NO SLEEPLESS IN MAC LAND

I finally have a modern computer monitor that can directly connect to my not-so-modern, but not that old, Mac laptop.  Typically with laptops using external monitor, I prefer to keep the lid closed.  I have this fear that a laptop is very vulnerable when it's wide open.  A push of the screen in the wrong direction can snap something and it won't function the same way any more.  When not in use, I usually keep the lid either closed all the way or at least leaning toward the closed position.  Alas, the way Mac OS X works, as soon as you closed the lid, the computer goes to sleep.  There's no built-in function like Windows where you can tell the operating system to Do Nothing.  There are utilities to disable sleeping but they don't work with laptop lids closing.  What a bummer!  Ya know, back in the day, the Mac was a superior graphical interface but in some areas Windows now has overtaken it.  Like this Sleeping issue, for instance.  My so-called workaround is to keep the Mirroring function, so that the laptop screen and the external monitor show the same thing, then close the laptop lid but jam it with my Bluetooth keyboard.  The laptop lid is in a slanted position so I don't gain any additional real estate space on my physical desktop, but at least I can see the big screen with the laptop screen sorta out of the way.