This would give you access to locking the display as well as explicitly locking your keychains (forgetting your saved account password in-memory).

Keychain Access used to offer an option to display a lock icon in the menu bar, next to the clock. Touch Bar equipped MacBook Pro notebook computers can be configured to provide a 'Lock Screen' button in the right-hand 'control strip' (amusingly, this name also dates back to Classic Mac OS 8 or 9…) by using The 'Customize Touch Bar…' action under Keyboard System Preferences.ĭrag the Screen Lock action into the control strip portion of the Touch Bar.

Upper right to activate, lower right to prevent.) (This is a nod to a classic feature, dating back to one of the original screensavers on the original 1984 Macintosh: After Dark, and before that, an analog clock screensaver and a black and white fireworks demo. This will allow you to 'throw' your mouse into a corner of the screen as the shortcut. To make this directly usable as an action, you can utilize the ⌃⇧⏏ ( Control Shift Eject) shortcut, or configure a 'hot corner' to immediately trigger the screensaver under Desktop & Screen Saver System Preferences. if reading a particularly dense textbook errata online or accidentally activating a 'hot corner'. It's often convenient to not set this to Immediate to account for accidental screensaver activations, e.g. To automatically lock your display after a period of inactivity when the screensaver becomes active, configure that under Security & Privacy System Preferences. An example: I have ⌘K ( Command k) mapped in iTunes to the Subscribe to podcast… menu item, to match Finder's Connect to server… shortcut. In this way you can add or change shortcuts for any menu-accessible action in any application. Use the App Shortcuts section, click the + button, define a new keyboard shortcut, and use the Menu Title of Lock Screen. Menu-based actions can be remapped by the user under Keyboard System Preferences, Shortcuts tab.

Pressing this keyboard shortcut combination or selecting this entry from the Apple menu will instantly lock your display. There's a default global shortcut as a modifier of the typical 'quit' shortcut to perform this action, visible against the Apple menu item Lock Screen: ⌃⌘Q ( Control Command q) Modern update for posterity, no additional software is required to do this.

Lock on screen saver mac