Using Hot Corners

Hot Corners is a feature of macOS that allows you to perform functions when the cursor is moved to one of the four corners of your screen. You can trigger Mission Control, put your Mac to sleep, run Launchpad and other functions. You can also set Hot Corners to only trigger if you have modifier keys pressed.

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Video Transcript: So even if you already know about hot corners you may want to stick around until the end of this video because I've got an interesting tip that you may not know about. 
What hot corners are, basically, is they allow you to trigger an action on your Mac if the cursor goes to one of the corners of the screen. You get to them by going to System Preferences and you can either go into Desktop and Screen Saver  in the screen saver portion or to Mission Control and there will be a button for hot corners. 
You can see the four corners of the screen and choose an action for them. Now a lot of the actions at the top of this list have to do with Mission Control. Either launch Mission Control or show the application windows, that kind of thing. If you're used to using Mission Control this is just another way to do it.
Then you can do some other things like bring up Notification Center, bring up Launchpad, start the screen saver or disable it if you leave the cursor there, or put the display asleep. Disabling Screen Saver is really useful. You can just put your cursor down in a corner of the screen and it won't go into screen saver mode. Put the display to sleep is what I use. I actually put that on the bottom right, put display to sleep, and then when I'm walking away from my Mac all I have to do is drag my finger down my trackpad to the right. It puts the cursor down there and the computer goes to sleep without me having to do any special key combination or choosing from a menu. 
But let's try Launchpad here. I'm going to move the cursor to the bottom right corner of the screen and you can see it brings up Launchpad. Then it stays there, it just launches it when I go to the bottom right hand corner of the screen. So I can still go and select something. If I go to the bottom  right hand corner of the screen again it actually takes it away. 
But let's say you have trouble with the because you accidentally move your cursor to a corner every once in awhile  and it activates it. It can be annoying. Well, you can add modifier keys to this. This is what a lot of people don't know about Mission Control. See if I select the menu items here and I hold down on my keyboard the Command key you can see how it modifies it. I can do Option. I can do Control. I can do Shift. I can do combinations like Command and Option. 
So now if I hold down Command and I select Launchpad you can see it shows Launchpad but with the Command key symbol there. Now when I hit okay if I move my cursor to the bottom right hand corner nothing happens. If I hold the Command key down and move to the bottom right hand corner I get Launchpad. So this allows you to further customize how this works and may make it more useful for a lot of people.

Comments: 2 Responses to “Using Hot Corners”

Narelle

8 years ago

In the past i have only used one corner because it bugged me starting stuff just because i waved my mouse to close to the corner, BUT now you have have showed the OPTION or COMMAND key extra tip = now thats helpful!!
Thanks Gary!

Harry Marks

Another "THANK YOU GARY!". For years I've been plagued by my screen suddenly disappearing when my cursor runs over something I'm not conscious of. There's a "do nothing dash" in hot corners that cured this annoyance in about 10 seconds! Thank you Gary!

Comments Closed.

Using Hot Corners

Comments: 2 Responses to “Using Hot Corners”

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