Chapter 3. Disabling the hot corner functionality on GNOME Shell

The GNOME environment provides the hot corner functionality, which is enabled by default. This means that when you move the cursor to the area of the upper-left corner and push the cursor to the screen corner, the Activities Overview menu opens automatically.

However, you may want to disable this feature to not open Activities Overview unintentionally.

3.1. Disabling hot corner using Settings

To disable the hot corner functionality using the Settings application, follow this procedure.

Note

This procedure disables the hot corner functionality for a single user.

Procedure

  1. Open the Settings application by clicking the gear button.
  2. In the Settings application, go to Multitasking.

  3. In the General section, disable the Hot Corner button.

    Disabling hot corner using the Settings application

    disabling hot corner using settings

3.2. Disabling hot corner using gsettings

To disable the hot corner functionality using the gsettings command-line utility, follow this procedure.

Procedure

  • Disable the hot corner feature: 

    $ gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface enable-hot-corners false

Verification steps

  • Optionally, verify that the hot corner feature is disabled: 

    $ gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.interface enable-hot-corners

false

3.3. Disabling the hot corner functionality for all users

To disable the hot corner functionality for all users, you need to create a dconf profile.

Procedure

  1. Create the user profile in the /etc/dconf/profile/user file. 

    user-db:user
system-db:local

  2. Create the /etc/dconf/db/local.d/locks/00-interface file with the following content. 

    # Specify the dconf path
[org/gnome/desktop/interface]

# GSettings key names and their corresponding values
enable-hot-corners='FALSE'

  3. Create a file in the /etc/dconf/db/local.d/locks directory, for example /etc/dconf/db/local.d/locks/00-interface, with the following content. 

    # Prevent users from changing values for the following keys:
/org/gnome/desktop/interface/enable-hot-corners

    The configuration file locks down the /org/gnome/desktop/interface/enable-hot-corners key for all users. This key controls whether the hot corner is enabled.

  4. Update the system databases for the changes to take effect. 

    # dconf update
  5. Ensure that all users log out. The changes take effect when users log back in.