Keyboard shortcut to turn off display not possible with MacBook Air
Shift + Control + Eject will turn off a Mac's display.
I just bought a new MacBook Air. It has a power button instead of an Eject key:
Besides a hot corner or turning down the screen brightness, is there a keystroke that will sleep the display?
Solution 1:
Just Shift + Control + Power works on my retina MBP, which also doesn't have an eject button.
Solution 2:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/18414/ase/DimScreen.tar.bz2 is my attempt at a solution to this.
It is an Automator Application which does two things:
It runs a script to dim the screen to 0 (see note below)
It launches your screensaver.
Why does it launch your screensaver? Well, because I assume that if you are dimming your screen that means you are going to be gone from it for awhile.
If the brightness is set to 0 and you come back to your Mac and press some keys, move the mouse, etc nothing will happen. Well, nothing you can see.
However if the screensaver is running, the Mac is smart enough to bump up the brightness just a litte to show you that you need to enter your screensaver password.
(You DO require a password to unlock your screensaver, right?)
Well, even if you don't, you can still use the app. After the screensaver exits, the script will bump the brightness back up just a little.
(If you find that the screensaver is being turned off by accident and you don't want that, you can just edit the last few lines of the script, and copy/paste it into a new app.)
NOTE / WARNING / DISCLAIMER / ACHTUNG
dimscreen.zsh is the script which is run by the application (it is part of the .tar.bz2 file). HOWEVER this script depends on the 'brightness' command being present at $HOME/bin/brightness, which it probably is not.
If the app does not find it there, it will attempt to download it from http://luo.ma/attic/brightness.bz2 and install it to ~/bin/brightness.
If the idea of downloading a file from the Internet skeevs you out, you can find the source code at http://mattdanger.net/2008/12/adjust-mac-os-x-display-brightness-from-the-terminal/ and compile your own (that page has instructions, it is dead simple).
I have included the source code as well as the precompiled binary in the .tar.bz2 file as well.
(As for the "Keyboard Shortcut" part of your question, I leave it to you to decide which of the many app launchers you will use, including something like Apptivate which can tie it to a single keystroke if you like.)