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Tuesday, January 6, 2009 at 04:26AM Do you ever find that you need more screen space? I do. Especially with all the video editing and graphics work I am starting to do. If you are using a mac, I can help! By using a simple script that I found while googling, you can trick your mac into thinking that it has a much larger screen than it does. For those who don't quite understand what I am talking about, here is an example:
This is Native 1280x800 resolution of my macbook:
and this is the tricked 1440x900 resolution:
See how much smaller everything appears? This is caused by upping the resolution, or effectively making everything smaller on the screen. Want to try it for yourself? I must warn you that some things a qwirky, and that I am not responsible for any harm you may cause to yourself or yourself. I'll let you know that it's suer easy and can easily be changed back though. Ready to try? Here is what you do:
1. Open up the Terminal Application on your mac. If you don't know how to do it, go to the upper right hand corner of your screen and click the magnifying glass. (This is spotlight, which is essentially a search engine for your whole computer.) Type in "terminal". When the computer recognizes the terminal application, double click it to open it.
2. Once in terminal, hit enter twice to clear out anything keys you may have accidentally hit.
3. Copy/paste this script: " defaults write -g AppleDisplayScaleFactor x " into the terminal box.
4. Decide what scale you want to use. I used .89 to get an effective resolution of 1440x900. You can chose any number you want, but they may work differently.
5. In the script that you pasted into terminal, replace the ending "x" with the number you picked. **HINT** TO RESET THE RESOLUTION TO THE NATIVE, ENTER "1".
6. Hit enter to enter the script.
7. Close terminal and any other applications you have open. Upon opening up each application, your resolution should be reset to a larger one. It's been reported that not all applications like this trick, so your results may vary. I'm not responsible for any harm done to your computer/personal being.
8. Upon restarting the computer, everything will be reset.
If you don't like the results (there are quirks) simple follow the steps again, but pay attention to the ALL CAPS in step 5.
Well, that was easy wasn't it? More space for those times you need it. You can easily reset it to the default, so there really is nothing to loose. At least try it once. Let me know what you think in the comments.
Reader Comments (2)
I tried this and used basically every number from .85 - .95 and none of them worked as well as yours did. It always looked a little distorted, mainly the fonts. I'm using a unbiody macbook with all of the latest updates. Any idea why it's not working at all?
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