Hot Corners vs a radial menu: four actions isn't enough
If you have ever set Mission Control to the top-right corner of your screen, you have used Hot Corners. They have been in macOS forever. They are the cleanest, lowest-friction gesture system Apple ships, and the moment you opt into them you feel a little smug — your mouse drifts to a corner and something useful happens.
The smugness lasts about a week. Then you start hitting the ceiling: there are only four corners, you keep firing the bottom-left one when you reach for the Apple menu, and the third action you wanted to add has nowhere to live. This post is about that ceiling and what to put on top of it.
What Hot Corners actually gives you
Open System Settings → Desktop & Dock, scroll to the bottom, click Hot Corners. You get four dropdowns — one per screen corner — populated with a fixed list of system actions: Mission Control, Application Windows, Desktop, Notification Center, Launchpad, Quick Note, Lock Screen, Put Display to Sleep, and a few more. Pick one per corner. Done.
There is one genuinely clever feature most people miss. While you are picking an action from the dropdown, hold a modifier key — Command, Shift, Option, or Control. The action gets prefixed with that modifier, and from then on the corner only fires when you are holding the same key. This is how power users squeeze more actions out of four corners and how everyone else stops accidentally launching Mission Control every time they aim for the close button.
On paper, four corners times four modifiers equals sixteen possible triggers. In practice, almost nobody runs more than two or three. The reason is the combination of the next three problems.
Problem one: only four natural slots
Even if you load up modifiers, the corners themselves are still four. Your brain is not great at remembering "top-left plus Option opens Notes, top-left plus Shift opens Calendar." It is fine at remembering "top-left opens Mission Control." The modifier trick adds capacity on paper and barely any in practice, because the cognitive cost of recalling the combination is bigger than the time saved.
The honest count is two to four actions. That is a useful amount. It is not an automation system.
Problem two: accidental triggers
Mouse cursors live near corners all day. The Apple menu is in the top-left. The notification badge is in the top-right. The Dock approach path runs through both bottom corners. Window controls sit in the top-left of every window. This is the most-trafficked real estate on the screen and Hot Corners turns it into a tripwire.
Modifier-keyed corners fix this — that is the whole point of the feature — but at the cost of needing two hands for what was supposed to be a one-hand gesture. You are now holding Option with your left while flinging the mouse with your right, which is the same ergonomic shape as a keyboard shortcut. If you wanted a keyboard shortcut, you would have made one.
Problem three: every trigger lives at a screen edge
This is the big one and the one most Hot Corners fans never put a name to. To use a corner, your cursor has to get to the corner. From the middle of a 27-inch display that is real distance — sometimes a foot of mouse travel. Fitts's Law is generous to corners (they are infinitely tall and infinitely wide targets) but it does not erase the journey.
Compare what a radial menu does. You hold a trigger — a hotkey or a mouse side button — and the wedges appear at your cursor, wherever it happens to be. Travel: zero. Then you flick about ninety pixels in the direction of the action you want and release. Every wedge is the same distance from the centre, so reaching the eighth wedge takes the same time as reaching the first.
Side by side
| Factor | Hot Corners | Radial menu |
|---|---|---|
| Triggers available | 4 (16 with modifiers, in theory) | 8–12 per ring + nested sub-menus |
| Where it appears | At the screen edge | At your cursor |
| Mouse travel cost | Centre-to-corner every time | Zero — wedges spawn under hand |
| Accidental fires | Common, especially top corners | None — deliberate hotkey or button |
| Action types | Fixed system list (Mission Control, Lock, etc.) | Apps, files, Apple Shortcuts, clipboard, emoji, text |
| Context awareness | None — same four actions everywhere | Profiles by Wi-Fi, display, time of day |
| Cost | Built into macOS | Free for 5 wedges, $9 one-time for unlimited |
What a radial menu adds that Hot Corners can't
Hot Corners is locked to Apple's preset list. You cannot put "open Figma" on a corner. You cannot put "run my meeting-mode Apple Shortcut" on a corner. You cannot put "paste the second-most-recent thing from my clipboard" on a corner. The whole point of Hot Corners is that it is small and finite, and that ceiling shows up the day you want a fifth thing.
A wedge can be any of these:
- An app. Open or focus Figma, Safari, your terminal — whatever you reach for by reflex.
- A pinned document. The brief, the spec, the running notes file.
- An Apple Shortcut. Anything you have built in Shortcuts.app, fired from a wedge (Pro feature).
- Drag-to-open. Drag a file from Finder onto a wedge to open it with that app.
- Clipboard ring. Your last 8 clips on a sub-menu, one flick each.
- Emoji and text inserts. Pick an emoji or paste a saved snippet without leaving the keyboard.
- Sub-menus. Hover a wedge to fan out a second ring of 8–12 more actions. Recursive.
And because Swik supports profiles, the menu that opens at home Wi-Fi can be different from the one at the office, and the layout for an external display can be different from the laptop screen. Hot Corners has none of that — it is the same four actions in every context.
The honest "keep both" setup
Do not delete Hot Corners. There are one or two passive actions where they are still the best tool on the Mac:
- Lock Screen in the bottom-right. Walk away, throw the mouse, screen locks. No hotkey beats this.
- Put Display to Sleep in the bottom-left. Same idea for sleep.
- Mission Control in the top-right if you swipe-and-look for windows constantly.
Use Hot Corners for two or three of those, hold a modifier on any that fire by accident, and stop trying to make corners do the active launching and switching they were never designed for. Bind a radial menu to a hotkey or a mouse side button and put the other twenty things you reach for on its wedges.
The split is clean: Hot Corners for "the cursor is already over there anyway, fire something passive." Radial menu for "I am working in the middle of the screen and I need an action right now." Different triggers, different jobs, no collision.
The one-paragraph version
Hot Corners is a beautiful, finite gesture system. Four triggers, fixed action list, locked to the screen edge. If your needs fit inside that, you do not need anything else. The day you want a fifth action, an app on a wedge, a Shortcut you built last week, or a launcher that appears under your cursor instead of fifteen centimetres away — you have outgrown it. A radial menu is the same gesture idea (hold, flick, release) scaled up by an order of magnitude. Keep the Lock Screen corner. Add the rest as wedges.
Frequently asked questions
Where are Hot Corners on macOS?
System Settings → Desktop & Dock → scroll to the bottom and click Hot Corners. Each of the four corners has a dropdown of system actions like Mission Control, Launchpad, Notification Center, Lock Screen, or Put Display to Sleep. Holding a modifier key (Command, Shift, Option, Control) while assigning the action means you only trigger that corner when the modifier is held — useful for preventing accidental fires.
How many actions can Hot Corners actually run?
Four corners times four single modifier keys equals sixteen on paper. In practice almost nobody uses more than two or three. Memorising which corner-plus-modifier combination runs which action is harder than it sounds, and you still have to mouse all the way to a screen edge to use any of them.
Why is a radial menu better than Hot Corners?
Three reasons. It appears at your cursor, so there is no mouse travel. It gives you eight to twelve wedges on the first ring plus nested sub-menus, so you can reach far more than four actions. And it is bound to a deliberate trigger — a hotkey or a mouse side button — so it never fires accidentally the way corners do when you reach for the menu bar or the close button.
Can I keep Hot Corners and add a radial menu?
Yes, and most people do. Hot Corners are great for one or two passive actions you genuinely want at the screen edge — Lock Screen in the bottom-right is the classic. A radial menu handles the active launching and switching that needs more than four targets. They do not collide because they use completely different triggers.
Swik — a radial menu for macOS
Twelve wedges plus sub-menus, at your cursor, on a hotkey or a mouse side button. Free for five wedges, $9 one-time for unlimited. Requires macOS 14 Sonoma or later.
Download for macOS