Setting AppleDisplayScaleFactor for single applications

Mar 22, '11 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: ctopfel

Apples hidden AppleDisplayScaleFactor provides a means to set the UI display scaling factor, a feature which has been built into Mac OS X since Tiger (I think) but has never been exploited so far (probably due to the difficulties from moving from pixel-oriented graphics to a more generic concept).

Many applications don't support this feature yet, so setting the factor globally results in a big mess in some of the applications. Setting the scale factor for single applications however helps in saving some screen estate.

I'm running two screens, one is a 24 inch display (1920x1200), the other my MacBook Pro's internal 12800x800 pixel screen. Although this is quite some space, I'm always running low on screen estate. I found that setting the Display UI Factor to 0.85 saved quite a bit of space when applied to the following (for me always running) applications: Mail, iTunes, iCal, Skype.

This can be accomplished by using the following code in Terminal:

defaults write /theapp/ AppleDisplayScaleFactor 0.85

To reset back to the default behavior use:

defaults write /theapp/ AppleDisplayScaleFactor 1

Please note that /theapp/ needs to be replaced by one of the following:

I also tried it on NetNewsWire, Finder and Google Chrome, but they displayed artifacts, and for Chrome it was a better solution to set a global website scale factor of 83% in the preferences (a feature which is not present in Safari unfortunately).

[crarko adds: I tested this, and it works as described. If folks test it with other applications please post your results in the comments.]

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