Keyboard Shortcut For Entering Screen Saver

If you open Keychain Access (I use Spotlight, but you can go to /Applications/Utilities), go to the main menu and hit Preferences... (or Command-,) you'll find a checkbox labeled "Show keychain status in menu bar..." If you check it, you'll get a little lock in your menubar.

If you click "Lock Screen", your screensaver will activate. I use this at work as an OSX Control-Alt-Delete alternative.

(Note: it will require your user password to unlock the screen. This may/may not be desirable.)

Well this is sort of a hack, but you can create a script/service to enable the screensaver and then assign it a shortcut. This AppleScript works for enabling the screensaver:

tell application "ScreenSaverEngine" to activate

You have two options for assigning a keyboard shortcut to this script:

• Save it as a service and assign it a keyboard shortcut through System Preferences. Here's how you would do it:
  1. Open Automator and select Service
  2. On the left-side menu, select Utilities.
  3. In Utilities, drag and drop the "Run Applescript" action into your workflow
  4. Copy the applescript above into the "Run Applescript" action
  5. Save
  6. Open System Preferences and go to the "Keyboard Pane"
  7. Navigate to the "Services" menu from the "Keyboard Shortcuts" pane
  8. Select the service you just created and give it a shortcut
• Download FastScripts and give it a keyboard shortcut through there.