Daring Fireball
MacOS Tip: Enable the Zoom ‘Peek’ Gesture
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/13/macos-zoom-gesture
MacOS Tip: Enable the Zoom ‘Peek’ Gesture

Link to: https://unsung.aresluna.org/testing-tip-enable-the-zoom-peek-gesture/

Daring Fireball
Apr 13 at 5:49pmDF Tootbot
Show threadGeoff Coffey1d ago
@daringfireball Re: several vs. many… My friend, this feature has been built in to macOS since at least 7.5. It was called "CloseView" in classic macOS.
Show threadSteve Barnes1d ago

@gwcoffey, @daringfireball –

I was about to say: I remember zooming around to imitate the quick pans in early episodes of The Simpsons, and I thought I remembered doing it with HyperCard stacks open.

Show threadGeoff Coffey1d ago
@Starfia @daringfireball Yeah I used it all the time to look at that sweet sweet 1 bit pixel art. Command-option-O and then up and down arrows.
Show threadJimmy Callin1d ago
@daringfireball I’ve been using it regularly since Tiger. It used to be enabled by default as ctrl+scroll, and annoyed the heck out of me when they disabled it by default a few years back.
Show threadDoug Miller1d ago
@daringfireball I found this somehow with my M2 MacBook Air when I bought it, then when I upgraded to the M5 last month it took me forever to find it. I felt lost without it.
Show threadSeth Milliken19h ago
@daringfireball “Smooth Images” might not be a great default if you’re using it to inspect UI details, but if you’re actually using Zoom as an accessibility feature to better see portions of your screen, why would you want to look at jagged images and read pixelated text?
Show threadMagnus Ahltorp13h ago

@SethMilliken @daringfireball I use it constantly, with smoothing, and have used it for ages.

Most applications don't support zooming, and even if they do, like Preview, it makes e.g. navigation work differently, or I will have to restore zooming after I'm done.

Zooming in the screen is totally transparent to the application, and with today's high pixel densities, the results are amazing, especially on laptops, where screen estate is so limited.

Show threadMagnus Ahltorp12h ago

@SethMilliken @daringfireball As late as yesterday I used it to read a PDF of a scanned book, where the book was in the corner of each page, with lots of blank space around it.

Manually zooming in each page makes navigation to the next page very awkward, and would require me to adjust the framing all the time.

Instead setting Preview to the whole page and zooming the screen makes navigation much easier.

I use the feature without thinking about it, just like zooming on a touch screen.