You might wonder what to do with that Eject key on your Mac keyboard, now that drives with ejectable media are gone… or you may not use your power key to its full potential…
Personally, I’ve been using Ctrl + Eject or Ctrl + Power (depending on what key you have at the top right of your keyboard) for quite some time now. It brings up a popup dialog with the following options:
- Restart
- Sleep
- (Cancel)
- Shut Down
But I always found a missing item here:
- Lock Screen (or Login Screen would also do)
I accidentally stumbled on the right shortcut for that today: Ctrl + Shift + Eject or Ctrl + Shift + Power will put your display to sleep immediately, and if you have your security preferences set up to lock your screen when display goes to sleep, you’re all set. Neat! This is the fastest way I know to lock a Mac when I don’t want to put it to sleep.
By the way, if you want to put it to sleep, without confirmation, you can use Cmd + Option + Eject or Cmd + Option + Power .
Be careful though, there are also “deadly” restart and shutdown without confirmation shortcuts involving Cmd + Ctrl + … A good way to lose some work… Thus I’d recommend to stay away from the Cmd key all together when trying out these shortcuts ;)