Use active corners to streamline access to the notification center, desktop, and more on macOS

macOS includes a lot of adjustments that help us to be more productive and work much better, such as deactivating automatic correction, placing recent apps and folders in the Dock, or activating the mouse tracking speed. And another one of these settings, quite unknown and little used, is Active corners . Let's see how it works and how to get the most out of it.

Active corners on your Mac

The Active Corners option converts each of the four corners of your Mac screen into actions. You simply have to move the cursor to the corresponding corner and the action you have assigned to that corner will start.

In this way you can quickly access the Notification Center, show the desktop or open the Application Launchpad. And while there are keyboard shortcuts, buttons, and gestures to perform these tasks, none of those methods is as quick and even natural as moving the cursor.

Currently, you can configure Active Corner for various actions or tasks: show Mission Control, Application Windows, Desktop, Dashboard, Notification Center or Launchpad, as well as Start or Deactivate the screen saver and Put the screen to sleep. But you can only use four of these actions at a time, one for each corner.

You can activate Active Windows from two places, both in the “System Preferences” application. The first option is to press the "Active Corners…" button in the lower left corner of the Mission Control category (image above). The second option is a little more hidden: in the Desktop and screensavers category → Screensavers section → "Active corners…" button in the lower right (lower image)

Now all you have to do is assign each of the corners of your screen the desired task. You can configure up to a maximum of four tasks, one for each corner, although you can also set only one, two or three, according to your needs.

Choose the tasks you assign to each of the corners carefully and you will be able to see how you can no longer live without the Active Corners option activated.