There's also a menu bar item which you can click to lock the screen. It's a free (donations accepted) app which will let you assign a keyboard shortcut to lock the screen. However, if you are not averse to a solution using a 3rd party app, I think the answer to your question is 'No, there isn't a command line way to do this.'īecause this is a menu bar item, it's not something that you can access easily using Keyboard Maestro or another similar tool. In the usual way in The Keyboard Shortcuts. You then give the service a Keyboard shortcut. Tell (menu bar item 1 of menu bar 1 where description is 'Keychain menu extra')Ĭan be used in a Automator 'Run Applescript' Action in a Automator Service Workflow. This applescript code: (updated, sourced from Using AppleScript to lock screen, confirmed working in El Capitan) tell application 'System Events' to tell process 'SystemUIServer' Using key codes to navigate menus can be hit and miss.Īnd as much as I do not like GUI scripting because it can also be hit and miss imho it is less hit and miss in this case. Old answer for previous OS below Arondson answer goes into using some key codes to navigate the Keychain Lock Screen menu.Īll the key codes can be bypassed using GUI Scripting to Actually hit the menu items directly. This has the default keyboard short cut of crtl + cmd + Q The Lock Screen for keychain no longer is available in current version of the MacOS Mojave & High Sierra.Īpple have now add a Lock Screen Menu item in the Apple menu. Id instance = init] Ĭlang -framework Foundation main.m -o lockscreenĮxecute the program by typing.

NSBundle *bundle = Ĭlass principalClass = # Do our work in the temporary directory that gets cleaned on boot You can create a small binary for locking your screen by pasting this into your terminal. This solution works perfectly as long as Apple doesn't change the relevant parts in the keychain menu plugin. Today I just had some time to play around and found a way to programmatically actually call the functionality from the keychain menu plugin. I was also looking for a solution for this. Note: This solution is unique in that it uses the Keychain Access menu bar status functionality, but it does not require you to enable the Show keychain status in menu bar option as the AppleScript methods do.

Lock on screen saver mac