Ever since Tiger came out, I have found that using hot corners to activate my screensaver to lock my machine didn’t seem as reliable. If I did not leave the mouse cursor resting in the appropriate corner, the screensaver would stop before it even started leaving my machine unlocked. So I found the following tip to set up a keyboard shortcut. Seems a little clunky, but it works.

1. Open the Keychain Access application (/Applications/Utilities/Keychain Access).
2. Open the Preferences panel (menu: Keychain Access->Preferences).
3. Make sure “Show Status in Menu Bar” is enabled.
4. Now close the Preferences panel and then the Keychain Access application.

If you click on the Keychain Access menu extra that should have appeared in the menubar (it looks like a tiny lock), you can try pressing the “Lock Screen” option: this will, as you’d expect, lock the screen.

The next part of this hint involves assigning a keyboard shortcut that will activate the Lock Screen option of the Keychain Access menu extra.

1. Start System Preferences (/Applications/System Preferences).
2. Click on Keyboard & Mouse.
3. Click on the Keyboard Shortcuts panel.
4. Under Application Keyboard Shortcuts -> All Applications, click the “+” sign (lower left corner) to add a shortcut.
5. For Application, choose All Applications.
6. For Menu Title, enter Lock Screen
7. In the Keyboard Shortcut field, press Control-F9 (press the Control key first, hold it down, then press the F9 key), then click Add.
8. Before leaving the Keyboard Shortcuts panel, scroll up and find the “Move focus to status menus in the menu bar” entry. On my default install of Tiger 10.4.1, this shortcut is defined as ^F8 (Control plus the F8 key).

Now close System Preferences and in a terminal window type killall SystemUIServer.

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