akweteco01: 10.7: Turn off zoom effect on new windows

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

10.7: Turn off zoom effect on new windows

Love the new Lion operating system but hate that gratuitous zoom effect when opening a new window? Well, you can turn it off with a hidden preference setting.

Open a Terminal window (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app -- which curiously doesn't suffer the window zooming issue anyway) and enter the following command:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool NO

You can either logout, restart or simply quit and relaunch each app for it to take effect. It's amazing how much faster everything feels without the zoom effect. It probably isn't actually any faster, but it certainly feels it!

[crarko adds: Should you desire to re-enable the animations run the same command but change the NO to YES. A few people submitted this hint, but this one was the most complete.]