Hot corners annoying you? Make them explicitly requested.

MissionControlIconXOne of OS X’s notable features is its Hot Corners service, where by moving your mouse to a designated corner of your screen you can activate one of several designated tasks, including sleeping your system, preventing sleep, triggering Expose views, and more. These options undoubtedly have their benefits; however, there is also the problem where the default approach for assigning hot corners makes them too easy to trigger.

Even for a well-trained individual, having a hot-corner enabled that makes a change to your current view (such as enabling Expose), has the potential to be a distraction. As a result, you may find yourself avoiding the corner that this action is assigned to, since inadvertent triggering may disrupt your workflow.

If you are affected by this problem, then you can still use hot corners, but overcome it by adding a quick step that makes triggering them be more of an explicit request. To do this, just include the requirement for a modifier key be held when your mouse is in the hot corner, before the assigned action will trigger:

  1. Go to the Mission Control system preference, and click the “Hot Corners…” button.
  2. Click the desired hot corner menu to show its options.
  3. Hold a modifier key (such as Command) before selecting your desired action.

Any modifier key will do (Command, Option, Control, or Shift), and even combinations of them will work.

Hot corners in OS X

You can hold various modifier keys (in this case the Shift and Command keys) when setting a hot corner, in order to require these be pressed for the specified action.

Unfortunately you cannot layer different actions on the same hot corner with multiple modifier key combinations (ie, using Command and Option separately in the same hot corner will not work), but having these should give you custom options for triggering hot corners purposefully.

3 thoughts on “Hot corners annoying you? Make them explicitly requested.

  1. Pat Fore

    Great tip! BTW, it works the same in Desktop & Screen Saver (shown) and Mission Control. Just the Hot Corners button is in a different place.

    Reply
  2. MaX

    This site does not remember username and e-mail using Safari on Mac (latest versions). No problem with other sites.

    Is there a way to block Desktops bar showing on top of Desktop when moving or dragging items to the top of Mac Finder in Mac OS X 10.11.x El Capitan?

    Reply

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