

Upper right to activate, lower right to prevent.) (This is a nod to a classic feature, dating back to one of the original screensavers on the original 1984 Macintosh: After Dark, and before that, an analog clock screensaver and a black and white fireworks demo. This will allow you to "throw" your mouse into a corner of the screen as the shortcut. To make this directly usable as an action, you can utilize the ⌃⇧⏏ ( Control Shift Eject) shortcut, or configure a "hot corner" to immediately trigger the screensaver under Desktop & Screen Saver System Preferences. if reading a particularly dense textbook errata online or accidentally activating a "hot corner". It's often convenient to not set this to Immediate to account for accidental screensaver activations, e.g. To automatically lock your display after a period of inactivity when the screensaver becomes active, configure that under Security & Privacy System Preferences.

An example: I have ⌘K ( Command k) mapped in iTunes to the Subscribe to podcast… menu item, to match Finder's Connect to server… shortcut. In this way you can add or change shortcuts for any menu-accessible action in any application. Use the App Shortcuts section, click the + button, define a new keyboard shortcut, and use the Menu Title of Lock Screen. Menu-based actions can be remapped by the user under Keyboard System Preferences, Shortcuts tab. Pressing this keyboard shortcut combination or selecting this entry from the Apple menu will instantly lock your display. There's a default global shortcut as a modifier of the typical "quit" shortcut to perform this action, visible against the Apple menu item Lock Screen: ⌃⌘Q ( Control Command q) Choose either Put Display to Sleep or Start Screen Saver for one of the corners.Modern update for posterity, no additional software is required to do this. Go to System Preferences > Desktop & Screen Saver and click the Hot Corners button to assign an action when you move your cursor to one of the four corners of your screen. (For older MacBooks with an optical drive, use Command-Option-Eject.)īoth sleep and lock will turn off your display, but sleep conserves more energy by putting the CPU into low-power mode, spinning down the hard drive and stopping background tasks, among other things.

Use Command-Option-Power to put your MacBook to sleep. (For older MacBooks with an optical drive, use Control-Shift-Eject.) Use Control-Shift-Power to lock your MacBook. There are two keyboard shortcuts that effectively lock your Mac: Click the Apple icon in the upper-left corner and choose Sleep. Just close the lid and when you open it next, you'll need to enter your password to log back in.Īlso simple. With a password set, the following five methods will lock your MacBook:
