MacMost Now 225: Hot Corners

Learn about Hot Corners and how you can use them to have your cursor trigger actions like starting or disabling your screen saver, putting your display to sleep, or starting Expose or the Dashboard.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now, brought to you by Squarespace. For a great way to create your own website visit MacMost.com/square space
On this episode, lets take a look at Hot Corners.
So Hot corners are kind of like key board shortcuts , but they have got to do with the position of the cursor on your screen . When you drag your cursor to one of the four corners of your Mac screen, you can have it trigger an action. Lets go and take a look.
Now Hot corners is kind of hidden in your system preferences. You go to System preferences and click of Desktop and Screen Saver, you'll see hot corners come up as a button in the bottom left. Click on it , and it'll bring up this control. The control has 4 different pop-up menus, each one corresponding to a different corner of the screen, so you click on one , and you get all the different options  you can assign to the hot corner. The typical ones are Start Screen saver and Disable Screen Saver. The first one of course will instantly start the screen saver without waiting the period of time that you need. This is great for setting up a hot corner, so when you know you are walking away from your computer and you know your screen saver should  go on , it will instantly  go on, just move the cursor to that corner of the screen and in about a second the screen saver will start. Also Disable Screen Saver ,this is great if you don't want your screen saver to start, you can go ahead with your cursor to the corner there and leave it there, and the screen saver will never start no matter how long you wait.
Then there are three to do will expos�-All windows, Application Windows and Desktop  , and these activate expos� for those three different modes. This is a great shortcut for getting  to expos� , if you don't like using the keyboard shortcuts. The last one here in this group is for Dashboard, and will instantly bring up the dashboard , another great option if you don't want to go down to the  doc and click on the dashboard icon. 
Then missing here ,because this Mac doesn't support it , is a Display Sleep, this will instantly put your display to sleep or display on my Macpro or my Macbook Pro, but it isn't enabled here for this particular model of iMac that I'm using. But I think it's the most useful one. When I'm walking away from my computer, instead of continuing to let my monitor burn power , I simply drag the cursor to the bottom left and I have it set for display sleep . The dash in the bottom indicates that that half corner should be inactive and not used.
So only where you might want to set this up is perhaps in the left hand corner set it to Disable screen saver so that doesn't go on ,at the bottom left hand corner, I would normally set it to Display sleep , but you can have it set to Start Screen Saver, if your screen doesn't support that. I don't like to use the upper right one, because that s where the spot light menu is , and it's easy to mistakenly move the cursor all the way to the upper right hand corner and activate something. And then perhaps in the bottom right here, since I'm not a big user of expose, maybe I'll have it start Dashboard . And once you have all that in place , you can go ahead and move the cursors to those corners of the screen, wait about  a second , and one of those actions will immediately trigger.
If you want to know more about expose , you can check out episode 213 at MacMost Now.
Also some viewers have mentioned about how I talk a lot about twitter a lot , or how you can follow MacMost or myself at twitter, what about facebook. You can also become a fan of MacMost on Facebook. I've set up a quick link- MacMost.com/facebook. If enough people become fans , I'll start to add more content there.
Till next time , this is Gary Rosenzweig at MacMost Now

Comments: 4 Responses to “MacMost Now 225: Hot Corners”

Mark Sheppard

16 years ago

Another handy tip for Hot Corners is, you can add a modifier key to a corner gesture, such as the command key. This way you won't have a corner action accidently triggered unless you are holding down the modifier key while moving your mouse to the corner.

Rainer

I added a modifyer key to hot corners in Snow Leopard. It worked great, but the modyfied key disappears on me after a while and the hot corners get activated again solely by the mouse!

Gary Rosenzweig

Not sure why that would happen. Try adding it bacl and see how long it lasts.

Greeaatt!! I had a complete misunderstanding of what hot corners was. I was in system preferences and had done all you stated, however, I thought hot corners was having to "click" on the corner of the trackpad. Great explanation. Thank you.

Comments Closed.

MacMost Now 225: Hot Corners

Comments: 4 Responses to “MacMost Now 225: Hot Corners”

Welcome to MacMost

Free Weekly Newsletter

MacMost Online Courses

Keyboard Shortcuts PDF

Connect with MacMost

MacMost Sections

Popular Tutorials

Information