10.5: Sleep all displays via keyboard shortcut

Apr 11, '08 07:30:06AM

Contributed by: manum

This hint is mainly useful for iMacs (I have just gotten a new one recently, thanks to this amazing website), where you cannot turn the brightness down to zero to turn off the screen as you can on Apple laptops, or to simply turn off an external monitor. I don't know if it's documented, but hitting Shift-Control-Eject (the keyboard key at top right) will turn off your screen (which is very different from putting the computer to sleep, and is very useful in my opinion). This provides a fast way to sleep the displays without using the hot corner provided by Apple in Leopard (in the Spaces & Exposé System Preferences panel -- isn't that logical?).

Also, there is a little program called Sleep Display that can do this for you, and it is useful because you can associate it with programs such as Remote Buddy to put your screen to sleep remotely.

[robg adds: This didn't work for sometimes-Hint-meister Kirk McElhearn, probably because he's using a non-Apple keyboard. It worked fine for me with Apple's wireless keyboard and my Mac Pro with an Apple Cinema Display and Sony LCD panel -- both instantly go black when I hit the keyboard shortcut. I couldn't, however, make it work in 10.4 on my Mac mini, which is connected to the same Sony as is my Mac Pro, so I've marked this one as 10.5 only. I wasn't able to find this documented anywhere in Help.]

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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20080407091837231