April 11, 2007

Mac tip: Keyboard shortcut for screen saver

For a while now, I’ve been in the habit of locking my computer as I walk away from it. I had setup the bottom right corner of my screen to be an Active Screen Corner to start my screen saver (in my Dashboard & Exposé preferences pane), but I recently stumbled upon a way to trigger the screen saver with a single keystroke.

The screen saver is actually just a regular Mac application tucked away in your System directory. So start by linking to it from a more accessible location:

$ sudo ln -s /System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Versions/\
> A/Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app/ /Applications/Screen\ Saver.app

Then, after Quicksilver’s catalog updates, add a Quicksilver hotkey trigger with the object “Screen Saver.app” and the action “Open.” I set mine to ⌘+ESC.

Posted in Mac | By bhelmkamp

1 Response to “Mac tip: Keyboard shortcut for screen saver”

  1. # Chris Kelley Says:

    May 23, 2007 at 6:49 PM

    Thanks a lot for this tip! I like it a lot better than having to download a third party app to do it.