Comments on: How do you lock your screen on a Mac?

By: Yas

Yas — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 19:47:28 +0000

On Leopard (maybe on Tiger as well. Can’t remember…), enabling “fast user switching” from account preference will add “account name” as a menu on the top right next to Spotlight menu. You can temporarily lock your machine just like on windows from there, and you are logged in and any on-going tasks continues as well.

By: david

david — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 11:38:41 +0000

dude… i use sizzling keys preferences menu, it lets you map loads of things to shortcut keys like itunes commands and like windows (win+L) i have lock as (cmd+L) on mac

By: Critter

Critter — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 01:51:10 +0000

One thing you can use to fire off items that do not have hotkeys is Quicksilver

thanks for the post.

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 01:47:04 +0000

I use the hot corners. I sometimes activate it, but it doesn’t prompt for a password right away. You have time to move the mouse and all is well. I think it works pretty good.

By: Michael Sharman

Michael Sharman — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 01:15:43 +0000

Thank guys, I didn’t know about that one.

Keychain Access works great, perhaps the “Utility Lock” has one thing which Keychain doesn’t…you can set a hotkey to lock your system.

Apart from that they seem almost identical. Still, a small plus for Utility Lock but a nice one nonetheless.

By: john O

john O — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 01:00:44 +0000

How about opening up Keychain Access (utilities folder), go under preferences, select Show Status in Menu Bar. The new menu bar widget has an option for locking the screen.

I found out about it here (http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2005/12/16/what-is-keychain-access.html?page=last) near bottom of the page.

By: Jon MacDonald

Jon MacDonald — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 23:37:16 +0000

You can also have a lock put in your menubar using OSX’s built-in Keychain Access. There are some simple instructions here:

http://whatdoiknow.org/archives/000957.shtml