macOS comes preloaded with many features, and while many of them are easy to spot and use, some are hidden behind different screens. That doesn’t make them any less useful, though. These hidden features often turn out to be some of the best you can use to boost your productivity and get things done faster on your Mac.

Hot Corners on Mac is one such feature that hasn’t seen much of the spotlight. It allows you to turn normal screen corners into interactive corners that perform tasks for you. You can assign a task to each of the four corners of your Mac. Then, when you hover the mouse cursor in one of these corners, the pre-assigned tasks are automatically activated.

Why use Hot Corners on a Mac?

Hot corners have various uses depending on the activities you assign to all four corners of your car. If one or more of these tasks are the ones you frequently launch on your Mac, the feature can save you a lot of time.

It also helps you get back to your desktop quickly no matter where you are on your Mac. If you’re a Windows user, you probably know this feature where you click a small box in the lower right corner to bring up the desktop.

Actions you can assign to Hot Corners on a Mac

As mentioned above, there are multiple actions you can assign to Hot Corners on your Mac. From opening the desktop to viewing notifications, the feature has some really useful actions to use.

• Start screensaver – allows you to launch the screensaver on your Mac.
• Disable the screensaver – this deactivates the screensaver on your machine.
• Mission control – lets you view all open items on your Mac.
• Application windows – you can view all windows of an app with this option.
• Desktop – takes you back to your desktop.
• Control Panel – show the Dashboard.
• Notification Center – opens the Mac Notification Center which shows your notifications.
• Springboard – activate the Launchpad allowing you to open your apps.
• Put the display into sleep mode – puts the screen to sleep.

As you can see, it covers most of the core macOS features that you might regularly use on your computer. You can apply any of these actions to any of the four corners of your Mac.

At the same time, however, you can only keep four actions running as your Mac is limited to four corners.

How to set up Hot Corners on a Mac

Setting up an action for each of your corners with Hot Corners is very simple. All you have to do is select the action you want a corner to perform and you are good to go.

• Click the Apple logo in the upper left corner of the screen and select the System Preferences option.

• In the following screen, click Screensaver tab if you are not already there. Then find and click the button that says Warm corners At bottom.

• A small box will open that will allow you to assign a task to each of your corners. What you need to do is click on the drop down menu for any of the corners and you will see the list of actions. Select the action you want to perform for that particular angle.
• Since there are four corners on your Mac, you can assign four different actions in the pane. When done, simply click OK button to save changes.

The changes will take effect immediately and it is not necessary to restart the machine.

How to use Hot Corners on your Mac

Using Hot Corners is as easy as placing the mouse pointer in any corner of your Mac.

When the Mac detects that your pointer is in one of the corners, it will immediately trigger the action that has been assigned to it. You will see a screen saver, your desktop or something else depending on what you have chosen for the corner.

How to add custom keys to call Hot Corners

While the Hot Corners feature gives you quick access to some of your macOS features, there is a problem some of you may face. Since these angles are called up as soon as you put the cursor there, you may sometimes end up accidentally activating them.

Your Mac is aware of situations like this and so there is a feature that allows you to add a key modifier to invoke the 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 be started.

You can do this by going to the same configuration panel as Hot Corners.

• Click the drop-down menu for any corner.
• While the menu is still open, press and hold either one Move, Check, Optionor Command and then select an option.

Your hot corners will now only activate when you hold down the specified key and move the cursor to one of the corners of your Mac.

How to disable hot corners on a Mac

If for some reason you don’t want to use Hot Corners on your Mac, you can disable it from the same menu you used to set it up.

• Open the Warm corners configuration pane.
• From the drop-down menus on the screen, select the last option which is none other than a – (minus sign. Then click OK.

All corners should now be assigned a null task, which means that accessing the screen will not perform any action.