Modify the system-wide interface scale factor

Jan 25, '06 06:27:00AM

Contributed by: conceptDawg

I haven't seen this posted yet, but if you have the most recent Developer Tools (Xcode) installed, you can change the rendering resolution of any application (including the Finder). Just open Quartz Debug (in /Developer -> Applications -> Performance Tools) and use the Tools: Show Interface Resolution menu item to display this slider:


You can change the system-wide scaling factor with this slider. Any application started after the slide ris modified will use the new resolution. It is fairly buggy in how it renders things like menubars and the bookmarks bar in Safari. However, it is nice to play with, especially if you have an app that you like to keep up all the time and takes up a lot of space. Using this, you could reduce the size to something a bit more manageable before launching the application, then set it back as soon as you launch it.

To return things to normal, make sure the slider is set at 1.0 and restart whatever application is affected. Or use, the handy 'Restore scale factor to default (1.0) on quit' option.

For techies, you can also use the following defaults command to set the scale factor; this example sets it to 50%:
defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleDisplayScaleFactor 0.5
To return the scale to normal, use the following:
defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleDisplayScaleFactor 1.0
[robg adds: I'm nearly positive we had posted this one at some point in the past, but a search using any of the words that I'm certain I would have used came up blank. If you can find a duplicate in the system, please let me know.]

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