Mac Quick Tip: Active corners in OS X

February 7, 2016

Do you know the "Hot Corners" of OS X?

OS X is, by far, the world's most advanced and complete desktop operating system. Many times, of course, some of its "secrets" are well hidden in odd places and usually elude users.

But that's what we're here for and no feature of the OS will remain a secret. In today's video tip we'll see how we can enable the "hot corners".

But first let's explain what this is: it's mouse shortcuts, that is, short actions performed with the mouse. We can take advantage of the four corners of our screen by defining for each of them an action that will be performed when we drag the mouse pointer to them.

Click on "" > System Preferences > Desk and Screen Saver > (tab) Screen Saver Screen Saver. Select the bottom right "Active Corners".

We can see how a menu of options appears in each corner of our screen. We choose for each of them which action we want to be performed when the mouse pointer "touches" them. Our options are as follows:

Launch Screen Saver
Disable Screen Saver
Mission Control
Application windows
Labour Office
Dashboard (may not appear on all set ups)
Notification Centre
Launchpad
To put the screen into sleep mode

We select the actions that suit us, click "ok" and we close the System Preferences.

I suggest you don't set all four corners and avoid the top right, because we use the same direction to open the Notification Center, and also Spotlight. In any case, each user configures the mouse shortcuts as they serve him.

If all this seemed strange or confusing, you can see the example we prepared for you in the video below.