I use full screen zoom/magnification on all my computers. That works fine on laptop displays or on a single desktop monitor, but if you use more than one monitor, the computer zooms in both as if they were a single display and it all becomes a huge mess.

I know ZoomText supports zooming in on a single monitor and I know ZoomIt can be coaxed into working the same way on Windows, but, until a little while ago, there were no acceptable options on macOS.

So what changed?

Well, the other day I left my work laptop open at the office after plugging it in to the dock and accidentally zoomed in on the internal display and… it zoomed in on that alone. Nothing funky happened with the other display.

I’ve tested this at home with my own MacBook Pro and it worked the same. I guess it was a macOS update? There was no mention of any of this on any release notes I read.

There you go: rational multi-monitor zoom on macOS. Enjoy!

Have you noticed this at all? Who else had my use case? I really like using macOS with magnification, compared to Windows, so I image a few other people will get good use out of this feature.

  • Pat@mastodon.social
    2·
    9 months ago

    @MostlyBlindGamer

    This is pretty cool. I’d like to figure out a way to do this on Linux, I’m currently using the magnifier built into the Cinnamon desktop. The only setup I knew that did this was ZoomText, so interesting to know it works on other setups.

    • MostlyBlindGamerOPMAEnglish
      1·
      9 months ago

      Sadly, this kind of thing is why I switched to macOS. I’m not one of those “blind people need to use Apple devices “ diehards, but I got tired of putting up with Linux desktop environments.

      That being said, I’m sure there’s some wild x11 stuff you could do to pull this off. Cinnamon‘s zoom implementation felt the closest to macOS’ to me.