Q: I have a new MacBook Air without an Eject key. How do I perform the equivalent of CTRL-Shift-Eject to put the screen to sleep?

>Sleep

Sleep:

Hit the Power button, then the "S" key, in order.

Shutdown:

To do a quick power-off, hit the Power button,the the space-bar (so windows won't re-open), then the Enter key, in ordered succession.

It is possible you may be able to create your own keyboard shortcut

>SysPreferences>Keyboard

The only other work around I know would be to set the Display sleep to a lower number of minutes

>SysPreferences>Energy Saver

Not on demand, but  it will be your Display Sleep only.

leroydouglas wrote:

 

The only other work around I know......

Read my post, then you will know.

Or did it not work for you?

I read your post. It did put the computer to sleep, at least on my box.

The OP is asking about putting the display only to sleep.

The OP is asking about putting the display only to sleep.

Indeed.

My mistake. I apologize.

Go to Preferences/Keyboard and enable Keyboard Viewer. With the keyboard viewer showing, hold down the modifier keys to see if some combination give you the Eject key that you are looking for. I am not saying you will, but you might. When I first switched from a PC to a Mac, I had to do the same to "stumble upon" several of such keys. It is sometimes difficult to understand why Apple has decided to include certain keys but exclude others from a keyboard. For exmaple, the # key is pretty essential if you write software for a living and yet it is missing from the British keyboard. It does have § and ± though, which I have never ever used. Go figure.

I also use the ctrl, shift, eject shortcut to turn off the display and lock the screen. I called apple support to ask how I do this on a macbook air and they said there isnt a keyboard shortcut to do this...

Would be really handy to find out how to do this without an eject key.

The easiest approach is to just set a hot corner for putting the display to sleep.

I have an MBA with an eject key (late 2010), but that I like using the Hot Corner method the best. Awesome tip. Thanks!

Sly

Hot corners don't work well for me on an 11" air - the screen is so small, I'm always accidentally hitting the hot corner. A partial solution is to do a simple Automator action that you assign a keystroke to (like ctrl-opt-cmd-L) in the Keyboard system preference. You can have either the screen saver or the fast user switcher lock screen come up, Google "automator screen lock". You can also have Automator call a number of free screen sleep utilities if you want it to sleep in addition to lock.

I do not like using a Hot Corner (alone) because it is too easy to inadvertently sleep the display by random movement of the cursor. However, there is a solution that is as simple and fool-proof as the old Shift-Control-Eject....

You can add a "modifier key" (e.g., the "Command" key) to the hot corner sequence so that moving the cursor to the chosen hot corner does NOT sleep the screen unless you also push and hold the modifier key.

To add a modifier key, go "System Preferences", "Desktop & Screen Saver", "Screen Saver" tab, then click on "Hot Corners…". Open the dropdown for the corner you prefer. Before clicking "Put Display to Sleep" hold down the Command key (or another modifier key*)  and then click "Put Display to Sleep".

Voilà! Now the display will sleep only if you hold down the Command key before moving the cursor to the chosen Hot Corner.

*I believe the only modifier keys available for this are Shift, Control, Option and Command -- you can use any one of them or combinations.