While mastering keyboard shortcuts on a Mac is excellent for productivity, sometimes your hands are already resting on the trackpad or mouse. Reaching for the keyboard to lock your screen when a coworker walks by, or fumbling through menus to open your digital sticky notes, disrupts your workflow. macOS includes a brilliant, often-overlooked accessibility feature called “Hot Corners.” This feature turns the four physical corners of your computer screen into invisible, highly sensitive triggers. By simply flicking your mouse pointer into a corner, you can instantly execute complex system commands.
How to Configure Hot Corners
Hot Corners are built directly into macOS, but they are disabled by default. You must configure them through your system settings.
- Click the Apple logo in the top-left corner of your Mac’s menu bar.
- Select System Settings… from the dropdown menu (or System Preferences on older macOS versions).
- In the left sidebar, scroll down and click on Desktop & Dock.
- Scroll down to the very bottom of the right-hand pane and click the Hot Corners… button.
- A dialog box will appear depicting a miniature computer screen with four dropdown menus—one for each physical corner of your monitor.
- Click on a dropdown menu (e.g., the bottom-left corner) to see the list of available actions.
The Best Actions to Assign
You can assign any of the available actions to any corner, but some are far more useful than others for daily productivity.
- Lock Screen: (Highly Recommended) Assign this to a bottom corner. When you stand up to get a coffee in the office, simply flick your mouse into that corner, and your Mac instantly locks, securing your data from prying eyes.
- Mission Control: Assign this to a top corner. Flicking your mouse will instantly shrink and expose every open window on your Mac, allowing you to quickly switch between cluttered applications.
- Desktop: If your screen is buried under ten different Safari windows and you need to access a file saved on your actual desktop wallpaper, this action pushes all windows off-screen instantly.
- Quick Note: Flicking into this corner instantly slides a digital notepad onto your screen, perfect for jotting down a phone number during a Zoom call.
Preventing Accidental Triggers
The most common complaint about Hot Corners is accidentally triggering them when trying to click the Apple logo or close a window. You can solve this by adding a “modifier key” requirement.
When you are in the Hot Corners setup menu and clicking on a dropdown list to choose an action, press and hold the Command (Cmd), Option, or Shift key on your keyboard.
You will see the symbol for that key appear next to the action name in the list. If you select it while holding the key, the Hot Corner will only activate if you hold that specific key down while flicking your mouse into the corner, completely eliminating accidental triggers.