What Are Hot Corners On a macOS & How To Set It Up.
MacOS comes preloaded with a number of features, and while many are easy to find and use, some are hidden behind multiple screens. But that doesn’t make them less useful. In fact, these hidden features often turn out to be some of the best you can use to improve performance and speed up your Mac.
Hot Corners on Mac is one of those features that hasn’t received much attention. It lets you turn normal screen corners into interactive corners that do tasks for you. You can assign a task to each of the four corners of your Mac. Then, when you hover your mouse over any of these corners, pre-assigned tasks are automatically launched.
Why use Hot Corners on a Mac?
Hot corners can be used in different ways, depending on what tasks you assign to all four corners of the car. If you frequently run one or more of these tasks on your Mac, this feature can save you a lot of time.
It also helps you quickly get back to your desktop wherever you are on your Mac. If you’re a Windows user, you probably know this feature when you click on the small bar in the lower right corner to open the desktop.
Actions that can be assigned to hot corners on Mac
As mentioned earlier, there are several actions that you can assign to hot corners on your Mac. From opening the desktop to viewing notifications, this feature has some really useful actions.
- Start Screen Saver – allows you to start a screensaver on your Mac.
- Disable Screen Saver – This turns off the screensaver on your computer.
- Mission Control – It allows you to view all open items on your Mac.
- Application windows – with this option you can view all application windows.
- Desktop – returns you to the Desktop.
- Dashboard – Shows the dashboard.
- Action Center – Opens the Mac Action Center, displaying your notifications.
- Launcher – Launches the launcher, allowing you to open your applications.
- Put Display to Sleep Mode – Puts the screen into sleep mode.
As you can see, it covers most of the basic macOS features that you can regularly use on your computer. You can apply any of these actions to any of the four corners on your Mac.
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However, you can only support four actions at a time, as your Mac is limited to four corners.
How to set up Hot Corners on Mac
Setting up the action for each of your corners with Hot Corners is actually very simple. All you have to do is choose the action the corner should take and you’re done.
- Click the Apple logo in the upper left corner of the screen and select the System Preferences option.
- On the next screen, find and click the Desktop & Screen Saver option. This feature does not yet have a separate icon on the panel.
- On the next screen, click the Screensaver tab if you are not already on it. Then find and click the button labeled “Hot Corners” at the bottom.
- A small panel will open allowing you to assign a task to each of your corners. What you need to do is click on the dropdown menu in any of the corners and you will see a list of actions. Select the action you want to take for that particular corner.
- Since your Mac has four corners, you can assign four different actions to the panel. When you’re done, just click the OK button to save your changes.
The changes will take effect immediately and you do not need to restart your computer.
How to use Hot Corners on your Mac
Using Hot Corners is as easy as hovering your mouse over any corner of your Mac.
When the Mac detects that the pointer is in one of the corners, it immediately launches the action assigned to it. You will see a splash screen, desktop, or whatever, depending on what you choose for the corner.
How to add custom keys to call hot corners
While the Hot Corners feature allows you to quickly access some macOS features, there is actually an issue that some of you may be experiencing. Since these corners are activated as soon as you hover your cursor there, sometimes you can accidentally trigger them.
Your Mac is aware of these situations, so there is a function that allows you to add a key modifier to trigger hot corners. This means that you can assign a key to these corners, and only when you press this key and move the cursor to the corner, the task will start.
You can do this by going to the same Hot Corners configuration panel.
- Click the drop-down menu for any corner.
- While the menu is still open, hold down any of them. Shift, Control, Option, or Command, and then select the option you want.
Hot Corners now only fire when you press and hold the specified key and move the cursor to one of the corners on your Mac.
How to disable Hot Corners on Mac
If for some reason you don’t want to use Hot Corners on your Mac, you can turn it off in the same menu that you used to configure it.
- Open the Hot Corners configuration panel.
- Select the last option from the drop-down menus on the screen, which is nothing more than a – (minus) sign. Then click OK.
All corners should now be assigned an empty task, which means that accessing them on the screen will not result in any action.
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