HOW TO Use Hot Corners on your Mac

1 Open Preferences

Hot Corners live in two places on your Mac: they’re in System Preferences > Desktop & Screen Saver, and they’re in System Prefs > Mission Control too. It doesn’t matter which one you choose: they’ll both take you to the same options.

2 Find the button

If you went for the Screen Saver option, you’ll need to click the Screen Saver button. You should now see the Hot Corners button at the bottom right of the window. If you went the Mission Control route, it’s at the bottom left.

3 See what’s set up

When you click the Hot Corners button you’ll see a pop-up window with four menu selections. On Monterey, the bottom right one may already be filled in with the Quick Note feature, which is allocated to the bottom right corner.

4 Test the corner

Let’s try that one first. Move your mouse or trackpad cursor to the lower right of your screen and you should see a Quick Note corner appear. If you keep the cursor there or click, the note will open up, ready for you to edit or add to it.

5 Change the corner

You don’t have to stick with Quick Note here. Simply click the menu for the lower-right corner and you’ll see a list of available options including screen saver options, Mission Control and Launchpad and some display options too.

6 Add some more

You can now make your way around the other corners to add more Hot Corners. If the menu shows a dash (‘–’) it means that corner isn’t currently active as a Hot Corner. You can disable any Hot Corner by choosing that option.

7 Test it out

In this screenshot we’ve made the top-left corner show current application windows, in this case for Safari; moving the mouse or trackpad cursor into the top left temporarily hides everything but the currently selected app’s windows.

8 Disappear to desktop

Here we’ve assigned Desktop to a Hot Corner; moving over the corner hides all of the apps so that we can see what, if anything, is currently on our desktop. With dual displays this shows the desktop for the display with the Hot Corner.

9 Launch Launchpad

In this example, we’ve chosen to activate Launchpad from our Hot Corner, providing quick access to all our apps and to the Dock too. It’s a great example of how Hot Corners can make little changes to make your Mac more you.