Quick Tip: Zoom In On Anything, Anywhere

Written on August 29, 2007 by Matt Radel and 10 people have commented

I was teaching recently and blew a few kids’ minds by doing this. If you’re using a mouse with a scroll wheel, you can zoom in and out on the entire Finder by simply holding the control key (by default) and scrolling up and down. You can change the key in System Preferences if you like:

Mouse Zoom

I find it comes in quite handy when I’m coding out designs for everyone’s favorite browser, Internet Explorer (boo, hiss), and I need to take a closer look at things that misbehave. I was surprised to find out that this wasn’t necessarily common knowledge, and figured I’d pass it along. Happy zooming!

Comments RSSComments

#1 Tim Hettler says:
Someone’s still developing for Explorer Mac? You poor soul…
#2 Josh Pigford says:
@Tim: Not sure if Matt was specifically saying Mac IE. The zoom should still work if you’ve got Windows IE fired up in Parallels or Fusion.
#3 Justin says:
If you’re using a MacBook or MacBook Pro (and I believe the G5 PowerBooks too), then you don’t even need a mouse to use the zoom feature.

Simply hold down control and use the two-finger scroll functionality on the touchpad. Works a treat ^_^
#4 Nathaniel says:
You’re a day late. I literally did this YESTERDAY by accident and had no idea how to turn off the zoom. Thankfully I had quicksilver and could call up system preferences, I turned off assistive devices and it un-zoomed, then turned it back on. I still didn’t know whch control it was that was doing it
#5 Matt Radel says:
@ Tim & Josh:

Thankfully I’m not developing for IE Mac - I’m running the IE wonder twins (6&7) in Parallels. If I was still working with IE Mac I think I’d be bald and insane by now!
#6 Lee Bennett says:
Now if we can just figure out why the centering gets loused up in some (not all) dual monitor setups. On my quad G5 at work, I have a 23″ Cinema Display and an old 15″ Studio Display adapted with an ADC to DVI converter. Centering stays just fine there. At home with my MacBook Pro and a 17″ VGA LCD adapted to the MBP’s DVI output, things get a little weird. It’s fine if I’m only using the laptop screen, but just adding the second monitor and–well, I don’t really know how to describe it. If it’s happened to you, you know what I’m talking about.
#7 Honza says:
It isn’t finder zooming. It’s more like a hardware zoom, but I’m not entirely sure to what extent.
#8 Matt Radel says:
@ Lee: Not sure if I’ve had the same issue. I use my MBP at work and hook it up to two monitors via a DualHead 2 Go. It actually works really well.
#9 Neil Anderson says:
Cool. Amazing how much magnification is built in to the zoom function.
#10 Vitor says:
There’s also a way to do it in a mouse without scrollwheel just do:
opt+cmd and + or - (in the keypad works too)