How can I make my screen blank by a shortcut?

You can just make a shortcut to the blank screensaver and then set a keyboard shortcut via the properties window for the shortcut.

The screensaver is called scrnsave.scr, located in %SYSTEMROOT%\system32.

You can easily do this with NirCmd, these four options will give you a black screen each (with side effect):

Turn off the monitor.
```
nircmd.exe monitor off
```
Start the default screen saver (set it to a blank one, so you can make the screen blank).
```
nircmd.exe screensaver
```
Put your computer in 'standby' mode.
```
nircmd.exe standby
```
Turn off your computer.
```
nircmd.exe exitwin poweroff
```

Make sure that you have nircmd.exe in C:\Windows\System32 if you want to call it from anywhere.

As Dennis Williamson pointed out in his comment, you can create a hotkey like this:

nircmd.exe cmdshortcutkey "C:\Windows\Temp" "MO" "Ctrl+Shift+M" monitor off

Or a shortcut on your desktop which you can click like this:

nircmd.exe cmdshortcut "~$folder.desktop$" "Turn Monitor off" monitor off

With AutoHotkey, you can bind any of the above commands to a hotkey:

#s::Run nircmd.exe monitor off

The above hotkey WIN+S would for example turn the monitor off.

An alternative program, if you dislike scripting, could be PhaseExpress.

Set your screensaver to the one called "blank". Press Win-L.

Here are some examples of using AutoHotkey to turn off the monitor or start the screen saver without needing NirCmd.

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