The fast answer
If you just want the shortcuts:
- ⌥⌘8 – toggle zoom on and off
- ⌥⌘= – zoom in
- ⌥⌘- – zoom out
- ⌃ + scroll – zoom smoothly to the pointer
These only work once the matching option is switched on in Accessibility settings, which is why they do nothing on a fresh Mac. That is the next section.
Turning on Accessibility Zoom
- Open System Settings.
- Choose Accessibility in the sidebar.
- Choose Zoom.
- Turn on Use keyboard shortcuts to zoom, Use scroll gesture with modifier keys to zoom, or both.
The scroll gesture is the one to enable if you only enable one. Holding ⌃ and scrolling gives you continuous, smooth magnification centred on your pointer, which is much closer to how you actually want to zoom than stepping in fixed increments.
You can change the modifier from ⌃ to ⌥ or ⌘ in the same panel. Worth doing if ⌃ + scroll clashes with something in an app you live in.
The three zoom styles
Full Screen
The whole display magnifies and the view pans as you move. This is the one most people mean by "zoom on a Mac". It gives the largest readable area and is the least fiddly to drive.
Picture-in-Picture
A magnified rectangle follows your pointer while the rest of the screen stays at normal scale. Good when you need to compare something small against its surroundings, or to check a detail without losing your place. In Size and Position you can make the lens bigger, or park it in a fixed spot rather than having it follow the pointer.
Split Screen
The magnified view occupies a band along one edge of the display. Niche, but some people find it steadier than a lens that chases the pointer.
Advanced settings worth changing
The Advanced button in the Zoom panel is where the difference between "usable" and "actually good" lives. Three settings matter:
- How the screen image moves. Continuously with pointer keeps the pointer centred and feels smooth but can be motion-heavy. Only when the pointer reaches an edge keeps the view still until you push against the border – far calmer for reading. So the pointer is at or near the centre sits between the two.
- Follow keyboard focus. The view jumps to whatever you are typing into. Excellent when filling forms, distracting when reading.
- Smooth images. On by default. Turn it off when you are inspecting pixels, on when you are reading text.
There is also a Maximum zoom slider. The default ceiling is lower than most people want for inspecting a single glyph or a one-pixel border.
Hover Text: magnify just what is under the pointer
A separate feature in the same Accessibility section, and easily the most underused thing macOS has. Turn on Accessibility → Hover Text, then hold ⌘ and point at any text. A large high-contrast panel shows that text, enlarged, without changing anything else on screen.
You can set the panel's font, size and colours. For reading a small label or a dense menu item it beats zooming the whole display, because nothing else moves.
Its limit is that it magnifies text that the system can read, not arbitrary pixels. It will not help you inspect an icon, a border or an image.
Zooming without Accessibility Zoom
Inside the app
⌘+ in browsers, editors, Terminal, Preview and most document apps. The app redraws its content larger, which means it stays crisp and – unlike accessibility zoom – it does appear in screenshots and recordings. The trade-off is that it reflows the layout rather than magnifying what you were looking at.
Pinch on the trackpad
In apps that support it – Preview, Safari, Photos, Figma, Maps – pinching zooms the app's own content. This is real content zoom, not display zoom.
Display scaling
System Settings → Displays and pick a scaled resolution with larger text. Everything is drawn bigger permanently. The blunt instrument, but for a long session of reading it beats holding a magnifier.
Text size, system-wide
Recent macOS versions have a Text size control in Accessibility that raises text size across the system and per-app. If your problem is "everything is slightly too small all the time", this is a better answer than zooming all day.
The Magnifier app is a different thing
macOS 26 added a Magnifier app, and it causes constant confusion. It is not a screen magnifier. It uses a connected camera – your iPhone via Continuity Camera, or a USB camera – to magnify physical objects in front of you: a book, a label, a whiteboard across the room.
If you searched for "Magnifier app Mac" hoping to enlarge what is on your display, you want Accessibility → Zoom, not the Magnifier app. Different feature, similar name.
Where the built-in zoom stops
Accessibility Zoom is very good at the job it was designed for: helping the person sitting at the Mac see the screen. Three things it deliberately does not do:
- It is invisible to recordings and screen shares. The zoom is applied to your display after the desktop image that capture reads, so QuickTime, OBS, Zoom, Meet and Teams all get the unzoomed screen. This surprises people mid-presentation – the full explanation is here.
- It cannot freeze or annotate. There is no built-in way to stop the frame and draw on it.
- It cannot magnify one region while you work in another. Picture-in-Picture follows your pointer rather than staying locked on the thing you are watching.
For your own eyes, none of that matters and you do not need another app. If you teach, stream, demo or record, all three matter, which is the entire reason tools like Gaze exist – zoom that lands in the frame, a lens you can pin, and a freeze-and-annotate mode.