How to zoom in & zoom out

Gnome Shell / Ubuntu 17.10+ : Magnifier

With GNOME Shell (instead of Compiz) as Window Manager (wmctrl -m):

• Super+Alt+8: Toggle zoom enabled/disabled
• Super+Alt++/-: To increase/decrease zoom.
  On some non-English keyboard layouts + won't work, try 0 instead.

Surprisingly, numpad +/- won't work.

You can change the shortcuts on Settings > Devices > Keyboard and zoom options on Settings > Universal access settings > Zoom:

Source.

Issues

• Screenshot of an area (Ctrl + Shift + PrntScrn seems to be broken when zoom is enabled. It captures a region with an offset.
• Does not start to zoom where the pointer is located, and in general you might find it very buggy.
• AFAIK there is no way (as in XFCE) to smoothly zoom in/out with mousewheel/scroll. Couldn't find even a GNOME extension.

See also

• Magnify a screen area

• Orca: Orca is a free, open source, flexible, and extensible screen reader that provides access to the graphical desktop via speech and refreshable braille.

• On 20.04 with gnome-shell 3.36.9 it seems to be a bug that slow down everything when zoom is enabled. journalctl -p warning -xef return

  gnome-shell[3302]: clutter_actor_allocate: assertion '!isnan (real_allocation.x1) && !isnan (real_allocation.x2) && !isnan (real_allocation.y1) && !isnan (real_allocation.y2)' failed
  gnome-shell[3302]: clutter_actor_allocate: assertion '!isnan (real_allocation.x1) && !isnan (real_allocation.x2) && !isnan (real_allocation.y1) && !isnan (real_allocation.y2)' failed
  gnome-shell[3302]: Source ID 6859556 was not found when attempting to remove it
  

Unity (until Ubuntu 17.04)

Unity Tweak Tool

Other than the Compizconfig Settings Manager, a new configuration tool is now available called Unity Tweak Tool.

Open Dash (by tapping on Super) and type "Unity Tweak Tool".

If it is not available, you can install it from the command line with the following command:

sudo apt-get install unity-tweak-tool

Open the application, and from the icons choose General under the Window Manager section.

Once you click General, enable the "Desktop magnification" option at the top. And you can change the default keyboard shortcuts of the Zoom In, and Zoom Out functionalities.

As seen in the next screen-shot, I have the Zoom In set to Ctrl+Super+Z and the Zoom Out set to Ctrl+Shift+Super+Z

Personally, I prefer including the Super key to all system wide shortcuts so it won't interfere with a certain application's shortcut.

Unity (until Ubuntu 17.04)

CompizConfig Settings Manager

1. Open CompizConfig Settings Manager.

2. Go to Accessibility / Enhanced Zoom Desktop.

3. Click on the "Disabled" titled Button of Zoom in, click on enable, grab key combination and press ctrl+f7. Do the same for Zoom out, and you are set.