Using Hot Corners

Introduction: In this video, we’re going to take a look at Hot Corners. This is a feature that I use daily. Well, let’s see why. Let’s go to my Mac. Before I show you what Hot Corners does, let’s go first fill up my screen with various apps and windows, then I’m going to show you how I use Hot Corners. I’m going to go down to my Finder here. Let’s go and open up a new Finder window. Click on it, and we have a Finder window. Let’s go and open up a couple more. Command+N. We’re going to move these around a little bit.

What I’m trying to do here is replicate how I work regularly. I have several windows open. I also have a few different apps open at the same time, so let’s go and open up a couple of apps. I’m going to go down to Calendar here, then let’s go and open up Contacts, and then let’s go and open up Safari. This is typical of how I would use my Mac. I have several different apps open, and I have various windows open. Now, what I want to do is I want to go to my Desktop. I want to hide all of these different windows, and I want to see my Desktop. Maybe I have a file on my Desktop that I want. I can do this with Hot Corners.

To use Hot Corners, what I do is I go over to my System Preferences. Now what I need to do is I need to go to Desktop & Screen Savers. You’re going to see an option here when I go over to Screen Saver. The option here is Hot Corners. We have to go to our System Preferences, Desktop & Screen Saver, and then Screen Saver. When I click on this, what I’m going to be able to do is set what I want my Mac to do when I move my cursor into a corner, a Hot Corner.

I want to set this corner here up to show my Desktop, so it’s going to hide all of my different windows. To do that, all I have to do is go over to this drop-down menu, and you’re going to see Desktop. I select it, and now when I move my cursor into the lower right-hand corner, watch what happens. I’m going to go and click OK here. I’m going to move my cursor down into the lower right-hand corner here. I see my Desktop. If you look, you’re going to see we have a gray border around my display. This is telling me that all of my windows are hidden. How do I get all of my windows back? All I have to do is move my cursor down in the lower right-hand corner again, and my windows are back. This is something that I use daily. I want to see my Desktop, I move my cursor to the lower right-hand corner, I can go and find a file on my Desktop. I want to get back to all of my windows; I move my cursor back down in the lower right-hand corner, I’m looking at all of my windows again.

Let’s see what else we can do. I’m going to go back over to Hot Corners, and this time we’re going to go to the upper right-hand corner. What I wanted to do is I wanted to show the Application Windows. Select it and click OK. Now I’m going to go over to Safari here. Let’s go and open up a couple of new windows as well, so Command+N. Now I have four different windows open on Safari. What I would like to do is I would like to see these four separate windows and hide all of the other windows. All I need to do to do that is go to the upper right-hand corner here, and when I go on the very corner, watch what happens. All of my other windows are hidden, but I can see all of my Safari windows.

Let’s take a look at this in the Finder. What I’m going to do is I’m going to go to the upper right-hand corner, it brings us back. Now I’m going to click on the Desktop here, and then I go to the upper right-hand corner. What do you think we’re going to see? We’re going to see my Finder windows. Go to the upper right-hand corner; here are my Finder windows. Now what I can do is I can go and select a window. We can see we have a blue border around the window. This is the one that is selected; it’s going to bring this one to the front. Now that window’s in the front. I want to go back to find all of my windows, my Finder windows. Go to the upper right-hand corner; I select this window, we can see we have a blue border around it. Click on it; it brings that window to the front.

That’s how we use Hot Corners on the Mac.