Sleeping the Display on Mac OS X
I very much prefer to sleep my display rather than use a screen saver. Using a screen saver is a waste of energy for one. Secondly, it often takes longer for a computer to wake up and respond out of a screen saver coma. Fortunately, you can still have your Mac password lock when waking from a sleeping display too.
Before we continue, a pro-tip. If you have a MacBook or an iMac with a Mac keyboard, then Control+Shift+Eject will sleep your display. This is for the rest of us below. Or if you want to assign it to another keyboard shortcut.
Alternatively you can also assign an “active corner” to sleep the display by going to Expose & Spaces in System Preferences, but this is too easy to accidentally trigger for me. However, if you do go this route you should at a minimum set the password lock to wait 5 seconds so that you can wiggle your way out of it in a flash if need be.
It surprises me how difficult this was to find and figure out. Just trust me when I say there are no other easy solutions out there. One day, I finally came across a hole in the ground with two apps that could help. They are standalone unitask applications that simply sleep the display fast and efficiently. One seems to be slightly faster than the other, but they both work fine. I’m holding on to both just in case one stops working with a newer version of OS X.
Now the advantage of having an app to do this for you is that it is a very easy thing from this point forward to assign it to a keyboard shortcut with another third party app such as Spark. Which is the app I’d recommend. It’s free and it’s very versatile and reliable. It even allows for single-key shortcuts!
Here are the two apps -
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2556515/Sleep%20Display.zip
And here is a link to download Spark -
