Blog/2024-02-23/Setting MacOS Screen Resolutions

If you use a Mac, you know that most of the time it hides lots of stuff from you. One of the annoying things to me is that it doesn't let you select the screen resolution often. In my case, this is partly my fault since I have my 3440x1440 monitor hooked up to a USB dock so that I can use my Macbook Pro 13" at home (yes, the one with the touchbar!)

Anyway, there's a GUI app called SwitchResX that gives you a visual way to do this, but it costs $16. The free screenresolution CLI app costs $0, like most free things, but has quite an arcane CLI.

But most important of all, it works!

This is a JPEG. The PNG is 7.2 MiB

The commands to remember are

Getting the current resolutions

screenresolution get

Setting primary display mode (horizontal x vertical x bit depth x frequency)

screenresolution set 1440x900x32@60

Setting both display modes

screenresolution set 1440x900x32@60 3440x1440x32@100

Setting second display mode only

screenresolution set 1440x900x32@60 3440x1440x32@100