display messed up

[steve7233]

I was typing CTRL plus + to enlarge a web page and my display suddenly got messed up! The resolution is correct but when I move the mouse The view moves. I think the screen size and resolution are correct but the view port seems to be to large. I tried both relogging also rebooting. I also tried switching resolutions back and forth. I can't seem to fix this. Any ideas? Do you need more info?

[jlittle]

Short answer, press and hold the Windows key and press 0 (but not the zero on the keypad, rather the zero beside 9).

Longer:
That sounds like the zoom desktop effect. On my system it's a bit flaky. By default Meta+= is zoom in, Meta+- is zoom out, Meta-0 is reset to normal size.

• In those "Meta+X" means hold down the Meta key, while you press X.
• On my keyboard Meta is the key between the left Ctrl and Alt; it has some kind of windows logo on it.
• "=", "-" and "0" are the ones on the main part of the keyboard, the ones on the keypad on the right don't work.
• go to System Settings, Desktop behaviour, Desktop Effects, and click the toggle beside "Zoom" and Apply to turn it off. Doing this while still zoomed confused my desktop and firefox.

In principle to restore sanity you can disable desktop effects, by default that's Ctrl+Alt+F12, but again on my system that's flaky, when I started typing this it worked to cancel the zoom, but now it gives me a blank, black screen; switching to a console with ctrl-alt-f1 and back with ctrl-alt-f7 gives me my desktop back but with desktop effects and the zoom still enabled.

[steve7233]

Thanks for the easy solution. I wish all my problems were this easy to solve.

Too bad there doesn’t seem to be a way to give - jlittle # 2 - credit for the solution.