Can I activate or disable the screen saver by moving the mouse to a particular corner of the screen?
If you want that, there is a program called Brightside that lets you assign configurable actions to your screen corners, including screen saver actions. The reason this behavior is not built in to xscreensaver is that I find it non-obvious, non-discoverable, and counter-intuitive. I believe that an interface like the existing Gnome “Lock Screen” panel icon is far more sensible. • With some other screensavers, there is a special key you can type while the screensaver is running that will change the graphics demo it’s running instead of turning off the screen saver. Why doesn’t xscreensaver do that too? While it’s not a bad idea, this is difficult to implement in such a way that it would work on all systems. On some systems, xscreensaver decides when to activate/deactivate by monitoring keyboard and mouse activity directly. But on some systems, a more efficient method is used: instead, the X server sends messages to xscreensaver telling it when to activate and deactivate. So in the latte
