After seeing this post by Casey Liss earlier today, I thought I would share what appears to be a little known tip regarding OS X Active Screen Corners.

Active Screen Corners allow you to set up shortcuts to do such things as start the screen saver, show all open windows, show the desktop, put the screen to sleep, etc. when you move your mouse to one of the corners of the screen. You can find the Active Screen Corners in System Preferences under “Desktop & Screen Saver”.

When you configure Active Screen Corners, it will typically look something like this:

This is great, except for the times when your mouse moves to one of the corners, but you don’t want the action associated in Active Screen Corners to occur. At work, I used to always have the screen saver start when I didn’t want it to, simply because I would bump the mouse into the bottom left corner of the screen.

The tip I thought I would share is that you can add a key (or keys) to the Active Screen Corners shortcuts. To do so, simply hold down a key such as Shift, Control, Option or Command while choosing the action.

As you can see from the setup below, my mouse will have to move to one of the corners while I’m holding down the Control key before the action will occur.

Of course, you can hold down multiple keys if you’d like. Here I’m holding down the Control, Option, Shift & Command keys at the same time while setting the action.

If you’ve ever given up on Active Screen Corners as I nearly did, I hope you find this tip useful.