Safer Hot Corners

Monday, December 3rd, 2007

One of the many new features that I appreciate in Leopard is the ability to set one of my hot corners to put my display to sleep. There’s one problem that I’ve found with this. I find myself often running my mouse into that corner while working, then having to wake up the display to continue. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were some way to confirm that I actually wanted to sleep the display so it doesn’t happen accidentally? Well, I’ve discovered that it’s possible to set the hot corner action to only occur when a modifier key is held down.

Just hold down any combination of modifier keys (Command, Option, Control, and Shift) while selecting an action for your hot corner. Icons representing the modifiers that you’ve selected appear beside the actions in the menu.

Now the action will only occur if the keys selected are held down when the mouse cursor hits the corner. This has greatly decreased my number of accidental hot corner actions.