Screen Saver Stuck On, How To Escape? Today I encountered a problem with the screen-saver, in which it couldn't be deactivated in order to return to normal work. Normally, hitting escape will deactivate the screen-saver, but this did not work. I could see the mouse pointer over top of the screen-saver, however.

I use hot-corners to activate the screen-saver, and I could still use those to re-activate the screen-saver, but then the escape key brought me back to the screen-saver "underneath", instead of the normal desktop. I could also activate mission control/spaces, and it looked normal, but choosing a desktop just brought me back to the screen-saver.

So, a summary of strategies I tried to get the screensaver "unstuck":


hitting escape
moving the mouse
re-activating and de-activating the screensaver via its hot corner
activating mission control with a hotkey and choosing a desktop
hitting cmd-opt-escape to try the force quit dialog


How can the screensaver be deactivated without shutting down the machine? I'm running MacOS 10.13.4.
I encountered this problem for the last two days on Catalina on my iMac. I tried some suggested methods, but lacked an Apple keyboard, and didn't restart or use SSH.
What eventually worked for me, I didn't find elsewhere:

Ctrl+Cmd+Q
Esc
login

Hitting Esc makes the screen go black, which I guess cancels the screensaver.