Tips, Tricks
& Treats

Quartz Debug Secret Options on Mavericks

Since upgrading to Mavericks, some of Quartz Debug's options are missing. What has happened?

It seems that Apple has decided to hide away some useful debugging stuff that was available in the past. You can bring those options back by setting defaults:

  • Fire up Terminal. The easiest way is to use Spotlight via cmd-spacebar.
  • Quit Quartz Debug.
  • In a Terminal window, enter defaults write com.apple.QuartzDebug QuartzDebugPrivateInterface -boolean YES and hit return.
  • Restart Quartz Debug. You will notice the new options in the Tools and Window menus. In particular, the "Show Window Info on Mouse Over" and "Window List" entries may be helpful.

You can wind back the changes by replacing the above defaults command with defaults delete com.apple.QuartzDebug QuartzDebugPrivateInterface.

After changing the default QuartzDebugPrivateInterface,
long gone options will reappear.

For beneficial uses of Quartz Debug, see also our advice regarding Chrome's performance problems when running on Mavericks.

However, if you intend to use Quartz Debug to enable changing of HiDPI modes, unfortunately, this doesn't seem to work anymore on Mavericks. Neither does setting sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver.plist DisplayResolutionEnabled -bool true. The easiest way to do it is to use the free app Display Menu. (MacConfig)

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