Gamely turns off Mac Hot Corners during a game, then puts your shortcuts back
The menu bar utility listens for Game Mode in system logs. Games running through translation layers can need an explicit exception.
Your mouse reaches the edge of a game and macOS decides this would be an excellent time to show every window you own. Hot Corners are handy until the corner has better reflexes than the player. Gamely gives those shortcuts a time-out without asking you to give them up for the rest of the day.
The free menu bar app follows macOS Game Mode. Its maker documents the awkward part: there is no public Game Mode API, so Gamely listens to unified-log messages from the system’s game services. The actual signal includes “Game mode is on”. Apple has left this utility reading the room, quite literally through its logs.
Before changing anything, Gamely saves the four corner actions and their modifier keys in its own preferences. It sets the actions to zero and restarts the Dock to apply them. When play ends, it writes the originals back and restarts the Dock again. That means the settings survive the app’s process; a crash does not have to erase the evidence needed to restore them.
The recovery promise has a timing detail worth keeping. The README says a later launch checks whether gaming has finished and restores the saved settings. It does not promise that a dead process can instantly repair the desktop. Someone who force-quits the app and notices missing corners has a straightforward next move: open Gamely again and let its recovery path run.
Some games never turn on Apple’s Game Mode, particularly Windows games running through CrossOver or Whisky. Gamely therefore has a forced-app list. A game being full screen is not enough reason to assume automatic detection worked; the menu’s status tells you whether the corners are actually paused. This matters more than another frame-rate counter when the desktop is the thing interrupting you.
The implementation also preserves a corner that you deliberately change while suppression is active, according to the project documentation. Restoring an old backup over a new choice would turn a convenience app into an argument with your own preferences (a familiar genre). Gamely attempts to distinguish those two intentions instead of treating every change as damage.
Installation carries a real catch: the project requires macOS 14 or later and describes its distributed app as self-signed, without Apple notarization. Its README offers a Homebrew cask and release downloads. That distribution choice deserves the same scrutiny as any other utility that edits desktop settings; “free” does not remove the need to know what is being installed.
For a shared work-and-play Mac, the attraction is the restoration. Turning all four shortcuts off forever would solve the interruption by throwing away a feature you use. Gamely makes the exception follow the game, although its reliance on system detection still leaves the next macOS change something the maintainer has to follow.
The desktop can wait its turn.