How To Zoom in on Mac

Need to see something up close on your Mac desktop? Want to zoom in on a Mac and don’t know how? Want some other useful keyboard shortcuts that will make living with your Mac easier? You’re in the right place!

A TechJunkie reader emailed us last week asking how to enable zoom on Mac. She couldn’t find the setting herself and wondered if we knew how. Fortunately, as an inveterate fettler in all things computer, I had previously stumbled on the zoom function when exploring the Mac desktop.

Once enabled, you zoom in and out on a Mac with keyboard shortcuts, which led me to wonder if new Mac users could benefit from knowing those too. Hence this post.

Zoom in on a Mac

If you’re using a new Mac or haven’t set up zoom before, you will need to enable it from the Accessibility settings window.

Select the Apple menu and then System Preferences.
Select Accessibility and then Zoom in the left menu.
Check the box next to ‘Use keyboard shortcuts to zoom’.
You can also check the box next to ‘Use scroll gesture with modifier keys to zoom’ if you like.

The keyboard shortcut you will need to zoom in is Command + Option and ‘+’ to zoom in. To zoom out, use Command + Option and ‘-‘. Zoom works incrementally so press the combination repeatedly until you reach the screen magnification you require or until the desktop returns to normal.

If you selected ‘Use scroll gesture with modifier keys to zoom’ you will be asked to specify a key to use, Control, Command or Option. Hold down that key and then scroll up with your mouse scroll wheel to zoom in and down on the mouse wheel to scroll out. You can also use two finger swipe on touchscreens.

In the Zoom tab within Accessibility you will also a Zoom Style setting. You can select this to initiate full screen zoom or an isolated section that you can move around to highlight the object you want to zoom, like picture-in-picture.

Time-saving keyboard shortcuts for new Mac users

If you’re new to Mac, you may not know the full extent of the keyboard shortcuts on offer. Some you are never likely to use but some will make daily life much faster and much more convenient. Here are just a few.

The Command key is the CMD key either side of the space bar where the Alt key would be on a Windows computer. Some Apple users still call it the Apple key but for the sake of this article, I refer to it as Command.

Control-Alt-Command-Power button – Close all open applications
Option-Command-Escape – Force quit the application
Command-Tab – Scroll through open applications
Alt-Shift-Command-Q – Log out of your Mac
Command–Space bar – Use Spotlight
Command-F – Find
Alt-Command-T – Show the toolbar
Alt-Command-D – Show or hide the Dock
Alt-F3 – Open Mission Control
Command-L – Automatically select the URL bar in Safari
Command-Left arrow – Go back a page in Safari
Command-Right arrow – Scroll forward in Safari
Option-Shift-Volume – Incrementally increase or decrease system volume
Shift-Command-I – Open iCloud Drive
Shift-Command-R – Open the AirDrop window
Shift-Command-K – Open the Network window
Option-Command-L – Open the Downloads folder
Shift-Command-O – Open the Documents folder
Shift-Command-U – Open the Utilities folder

Document shortcuts

As someone who writes for a living, I use lots of document shortcuts to keep things moving. Here are just a few of them.

Command-B – Bold selected text
Command-I – Italicize selected text
Command-U – Underline selected text
Command-T – Show or hide the Fonts window
Command-A – Select all
Command-C – Copy
Command-X – Cut
Command-V – Paste
Command-Semicolon – Spellcheck
Fn–Up arrow – Scroll up one page
Fn–Down arrow – Scroll down one page
Fn–Left arrow – Scroll to the beginning of a document
Fn–Right arrow – Scroll to the end of a document
Control-A – Move to the beginning of the line
Control-E – Move to the end of a line
Command-P – Print
Shift-Command-P – Print preview
Command-S – Save
Shift-Command-S – Save as

Many functions familiar to a Windows users are also available on a Mac, they just use different keys. One aspect of Mac OS that most newcomers quickly appreciate is Spotlight and Finder. You will likely spend a lot of time using those search apps as you learn to navigate Mac OS and find out where all the settings are stored.

If you want to see the whole range of Mac keyboard shortcuts, check out this page on the Apple website. There are literally hundreds of them.