macOS is famous for its smooth trackpad gestures, but sometimes you just want to trigger an action with a flick of the wrist rather than a complex multi-finger swipe. Apple provides a highly useful, but surprisingly underutilized feature called “Hot Corners.” This feature turns the four physical corners of your Mac’s display into invisible, interactive buttons. By aggressively throwing your mouse pointer into one of these corners, you can instantly lock your screen, view your desktop, or launch Mission Control.
How to Configure Hot Corners
You can assign four completely different actions to your display, one for each respective corner.
- Click the Apple Logo in the top-left corner of your menu bar.
- Select System Settings from the drop-down menu (or “System Preferences” on older OS versions).
- In the left-hand navigation pane, scroll down and click on Desktop & Dock.
- Scroll to the absolute bottom of the Desktop & Dock settings page and click the Hot Corners… button.
- A modal window will appear displaying a small diagram of a monitor surrounded by four drop-down menus (representing the four corners of your screen).
- Click any of the four drop-down menus to see the list of available actions.
Choosing the Best Actions
When you click a drop-down menu, you will be presented with a list of macOS features you can trigger. Here are some of the most useful configurations:
- Lock Screen: Assign this to the bottom-left corner. When you need to step away from your desk at a cafe or the office, flicking your mouse down and to the left will instantly secure your Mac, requiring a password or Touch ID to resume.
- Desktop: Assign this to the bottom-right corner. If you have five Safari windows open and you need to drag a file from your desktop, throwing your mouse to the corner will instantly shove all open windows off the screen, revealing your bare desktop. Flick your mouse to the corner again to pull the windows back.
- Mission Control: Assign this to a top corner to instantly view all of your currently open applications spread out in a grid.
Once you have assigned actions to your preferred corners, click the Done button to save your changes.
How to Prevent Accidental Triggers
A common complaint about Hot Corners is accidentally triggering them when trying to click a menu or the Apple logo. You can solve this by requiring a keyboard modifier.
- Open the Hot Corners configuration menu again.
- Click on one of the drop-down menus.
- Before selecting an action from the list, press and hold the Command (⌘), Option (⌥), or Shift (⇧) key on your keyboard.
You will see the menu instantly update to include the keyboard symbol. If you select “⌘ Lock Screen”, throwing your mouse into that corner will do absolutely nothing unless you are physically holding down the Command key at the same time.