There are a lot of features on the macOS that are there to help boost your productivity. Hot Corners are one of these features. But like many other tools in your arsenal, they’ve got their lovers as well as haters.

While Hot Corners are there to speed up certain actions, they can often end up being a nuisance. Many users end up activating the action associated with them accidentally. If you too find the Hot Corners in your Mac more disruptive than useful, you can easily disable them.

What are Hot Corners?

Hot Corners, as the name suggests, refer to the four corners of the screen of your Mac. Like keyboard shortcuts, they can be used to invoke certain actions in a jiffy. Out of the 4 corners, 3 hot corners are not enabled by default.

Only one hot corner – the bottom-right corner – has an action associated with it by default. It’s set to create a Quick Note so you can jot down your thoughts in a trice.

The list of available actions that you can associate with the hot corners include:

  • Lock Screen
  • Start Screen Saver
  • Disable Screen Saver
  • Mission Control
  • Desktop
  • Notification Centre
  • Launchpad
  • Quick Note
  • Applications Window
  • Put Display to Sleep

All four hot corners are completely customizable, including the Quick Note one. You can change the action associated with them and set it to any one of the available actions.

You can even change the corner you want to use for Quick Note. For example, you can use the upper-left corner for the Quick Note and the bottom-right corner for something else. Or you can not use any of the hot corners for a Quick Note.

If you find that you accidentally trigger only one or two of the hot corners, you can only disable them while keeping others intact. Or you can disable all 4 of them. Hot Corners offer complete control to the user in that sense.

Disabling a Hot Corner

You can enable or disable the hot corners from the settings – System Preferences in previous iterations, but System Settings in the latest macOS Ventura.

On macOS Ventura, open the System Settings app from the dock or the launchpad.

Then, go to ‘Desktop & Dock’ from the navigation menu on the left.

Scroll down in the Desktop & Dock settings on the left and click the option for ‘Hot Corners’.

Note: On macOS Monterey, open System Preferences. Then, navigate to Desktop & Screen Saver > Screen Saver > Hot Corners

An overlay menu will open on the screen that will show the hot corners as per their layout on the screen. Click the hot corner that you want to disable.

A pop-up menu will appear. To disable it, select ‘–’ from the menu.

Repeat the process for each hot corner you want to disable. Then, click ‘Done’ to close the overlay menu.

Since the menu is separate for each hot corner, you can use any combination: disabling all 4 hot corners, keeping 3 corners active while disabling one or vice-versa, keeping a ratio of 2:2 – absolutely anything. The choice is entirely yours; experiment with what suits you best.