Craig Koster

Locking Your Desktop

One of the first things I looked for when I switched to Mac was a way to quickly lock my desktop when I stepped away from my desk. Unfortunately I had a hard time finding a solid solution. Through reading various blogs and trying my own things I came up with the following that works pretty well.

The first step is to enable fast user switching in your System Preferences | Accounts panel.

Next, fire up script editor and create the following script:

do shell script "/System/Library/CoreServices/Menu\\ Extras/User.menu/Contents/Resources/CGSession -suspend"

Once you have this entered, save the script to your Applications directory with the name ‘Lock Desktop’ or something similar. Make sure that in the save dialog you select a File Format of ‘Application’ as we’ll be running this script as an app.

Now, just double click this file to lock your desktop. I use LaunchBar on my Mac to launch things and whenever I want to lock my desktop all I have to do is hit the appropriate hot keys and I’m set.

Monday, June 1st, 2009