Desktop Zoom
Watching youtube or tv shows online, you have to look at a small video or there are distractions like ads.
Ubuntu has an accessibility feature called Enhanced Zoom Desktop. It was designed for visually impaired users but like closed captioning, it’s useful to anyone.
First, make sure it is enabled by going to System> Preferences> Appearance> Visual Effects. Select Preferences and then enable Enhanced Zoom Desktop under the Accessibility category.
To use Ubuntu’s zoom, press and hold the windows start button (between ctrl and alt) and move your mouse’s scroll wheel up to zoom in and down to zoom out. You can move the zoomed in area with your mouse.
Normal View
Zoomed In
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Thank you, I have been looking for some time on how to do this!! Much appreciated!
Mike
Mike
February 2, 2008 at 3:03 am
How do I disable this feature? I stumble into it from time to time and it’s disorienting and makes me nauseas !
TJIC
February 7, 2008 at 12:37 pm
Neato.
As a side result of playing with this.. I also found that “Left ALT+Scroll Wheel” will adjust the opacity of the window you are viewing.
Sean
April 25, 2008 at 10:41 pm
An awesome feature, great for when you’re presenting something to a class that can’t otherwise be zoomed in, like some embedded media clips.
Matt
May 19, 2008 at 8:41 am
This is great for the visual impared!
Thanks!
Grayson Peddie
May 25, 2008 at 3:28 am
This function doesn’t work for me for some reason. it works fine on the old version 7 but not now when i’ve upgraded my ubuntu version to version 8. i really need this function.
I can’t activate the function. it says the function can not be activated.
Is there any solution problem? plz help.
Chris
July 30, 2008 at 9:21 pm
love this when reading news in textform and need to zoom in. makes very good use of the screen. And u dont need to have problems with eyesight to find it useful. I actually stumbled on it totally by accident. Dunno how, but love it.
wooooohoooooo
Name
November 24, 2008 at 5:18 pm
This is not very useful feature, but caused a whole lot of trouble.
I had no idea why my underscore stoped working one of a sudden.
Had to enter my email user name by copying underscore from some elsewhere.
Had this headache for a MONTH!!!
Thanks for the article!
Roman
August 25, 2009 at 6:04 pm
This is a great effect. I was caught accidentally by this effect and discovered this awesome features..
Md. Rayhan Chowdhury
August 30, 2009 at 8:08 am
Enhanced Zoom Desktop sounds like a great idea for the fraction of 1% who needs it. For the other 99% of us it just a stupid annoyance we can’t easily get rid of. I have to turn off visual effects so I would stop hitting windows-r by accident as I try to hit control-r (browser reload in firefox).
I hope it made the designer of this feature feel all warm and fuzzy. It made me miss my mac.
Chuck Lin
October 19, 2009 at 11:11 am
It;s great. I don’t know how I found this, but I want to turn it off. I don’t know how to zoom out.
Savo
March 29, 2010 at 3:14 pm
Winkey + ScrollWheel
Savo
March 29, 2010 at 3:14 pm
Enhanced Desktop Zoom has some issue in Ubuntu 10.10. I use ATI Radeon 9200SE and activated this feature. Whenever I zoom in the desktop, the whole screen turn really really DARK! and there is no way to adjust the brightness at all. However, if you zoom out the desktop to it original size, the normal brightness return. So, if you zoom in, it turns dark. It only has normal brightness if you do not zoom. This kind of defeat the purpose.
Alex Yu
October 14, 2010 at 11:58 am
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November 15, 2010 at 12:19 pm
This is a good feature but, it really should be off by default. It’s not easy to figure out what the hell is going on if hit the key combination by accident, and you are stuck in zoom hell.
Dano
November 17, 2010 at 12:07 pm
Hi, Thanks for the tip. However, now I cannot zoom back or restore the desktop to normal. How may I do so?
Rykel
February 8, 2011 at 9:38 am
I just hit on this by accident… was trying to zoom something in the gimp and I must have hit the wrong key. Also found out that if you hold ALT and CTRL with the mouse wheel, it does other stuff.
Michael Feigin
February 8, 2011 at 11:18 am
so how do you turn this off in gimp?
Baba
February 15, 2012 at 6:57 pm
Hello! Today I accidentally activated this zoom tool and could not return to normal. Restarted gdm (because I use gnome) and searched on google about this feature that I found very interesting. Now, after reading your site, I know how to use it. Thanks for the tip! Congratulations!
Jadson Silva
June 9, 2011 at 4:44 am
None of this seems relevant to Ubuntu 11.04
Allan Lariviere
September 7, 2011 at 7:00 pm
In v11.10, The correct sequence to activate Zoom is
1. Go to System settings
2. Under System choose Universal Access
3. On the Seeing tab, change ZOOM to ON
4. Use CTRL + Scroll wheel to zoom up or down
Newbie
November 5, 2011 at 9:15 am
watch this video in this you can see that how to zoom in and zoom out in ubuntu
Rahul bhadana
October 21, 2012 at 4:40 am
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