Linux Mint: How To Use “Hot Corners”
Linux Mint offers a feature called “Hot Corners” that allows you to configure up to four actions to happen when you hover your mouse over a corner of the screen. Each corner can be configured with a single action, but there is considerable flexibility.
To configure a hot corner, press the Super key, type “Hot Corners” and press Enter.
Tip: The “Super” key is the name many Linux distributions use to refer to the Windows key or the Apple “Command” key, avoiding any risk of trademark issues.
Press the Super key, type “Hot Corners” and press Enter.
How to configure a hot corner
The hot corners configuration window has four sections mapping each of the corners. To configure settings for the upper left corner, use the settings group in the upper left corner. To activate the hot corner, click the appropriate slider to the “On” position. Next, select an action from the drop-down list. There are four actions to choose from: “Show all desktops”, “Show all windows”, “Show desktop” and “Run command”.
“Show all workspaces” will display a view of all open workspaces and allow you to switch between them. “Show All Windows” will show all windows in the current workspace as you would see if you pressed Alt + Tab and then held Alt. “Show desktop” minimizes all open windows and returns you to the desktop.
Tip: The desktop is essentially a second virtual desktop with its own set of open windows.
Click the slider to activate the hot corner, then select the desired action from the drop-down list.
“Run command” allows you to configure the command you want to execute when the corner is activated. You can type the command in the new text box that appears just below the drop-down box.
Note: You can configure the command to do some things like open a program, but not all commands will work. For example, you can’t run anything as root using “sudo” or run commands that require user interactivity. You may have better luck typing the full commands in a bash script and then running the script using hot-corner.
Finally, you can configure the activation delay in milliseconds. This is how long you have to continuously activate the hot horn before the action is taken. This is designed to prevent accidental use of the hot corner.
You can run commands like opening “Nemo” File Explorer and configure a delay to prevent accidental activations.
How to use the hot corner
To actually use the hot corner once configured, simply move the mouse cursor all the way to the full corner pixel and leave it there for the duration of the activation delay. This is easy if you are using Mint as your base operating system, but can be difficult in a virtual machine.
If you’re using a Linux Mint virtual machine, you can enable the corner if you’re very careful, but it’s inconvenient to use because you have to mouse over a specific pixel that isn’t in the corner or edge of the physical monitor. If you’re using a virtual machine in full-screen mode, using a hot corner is just as easy as normal.