The Negative Mac

Inverted / Negative Mac Screen I was very happy when I found out that there’s a key combination that will invert the display of my Mac laptop.

If you press Cmd – Ctrl – Alt – 8, then your screen will change into an inverted state.
See the screenshot for the example.

This is most useful for example when you’ve been using your laptop for hours straight and still need to do so for several more hours, but you fear for your eyes. No worries, just press that key combination, and the display will become more easy to your eyes.

It’s also very helpful in very dim place – sometimes a place is just too dark, even the lowest brightness setting will still hurt your eyes. No longer a problem now; just press the buttons.

And when I need to do that quick SSH session in the middle of the night without waking up my significant other because of the brightness from the screen, this is just the ticket.
No, I don’t do it very often. Honestly.

Happy holiday everyone, hope you find this post useful too.

39 thoughts on “The Negative Mac

  1. Actually, I often do this at any store that sell Mac, just for the laugh of it. Most of the time, the salesperson panicked, shook the computer or even hit it and finally restarted the computer.

    Then you’ll know how ‘good’ was the store (or the salesperson) knowledge about Mac. Heh.

  2. Pingback: Pages tagged "Mac"
  3. Hmm. Har, Looks like your commenter never read your post before commenting, eh? He he he.

  4. @avianto – you’re being very naughty there πŸ˜€ poor storekeepers, they probably thought their Macs got hit by viruses or something…. they must be panicking.
    .
    Gotta try that myself !
    .
    @mr.bambang – thank you, hope you enjoyed your holiday. I went rafting / arung jeram πŸ˜€ pretty crazy stuff. My wife almost thrown off the boat. A post with pictures will follow, soon ™
    .
    @belutz – finally the Boss showed up πŸ˜€ I didn’t know compiz-fusion can do that. Mind sharing to us how to do it?
    .
    … hm, looks like my compiz-fusion’s installation is rather old, let’r try upgrading it first.

  5. First you have to enable the “Negative” plugin under Accessibility. Compiz-Fusion has two mode for Negative effect, first is active application window only by pressing Super+N by default and second is to make the whole screen Negative by pressing Super+M by default.

    While the whole screen is negative, you can also make an active application window to be not negative. πŸ˜€

    Linux desktop is getting more user friendly πŸ˜€

    By the way, since I’m also a mac user now, is there a way to make an application window to be always on top in MacOS X?

  6. salam, mas.
    saya dari malaysia.
    kebetulan saya diarah membuat projek bertajuk ‘performance tuning using vmware’. terjumpa blog mas ini. terima kasih utk post sebelum ini berkenaan vmware, sangat membantu. cuma sekarang saya masih belum faham berkenaan performance tuning.
    salam kenal,
    terima kasih=)

  7. trims tipsnya pak dan bisa saya coba karena baru “dikasih” macbook pro..
    mudah2an bisa ditambahkan semacam undocumented mac command seperti dulu pak harry pernah tulis undocumented ms dos πŸ™‚

  8. kak sufehmi…
    i wanna ask…
    how to go back from the inverted one?
    do we press the same keys
    ctrl plus command plus alt plus 8 ?

    thank you !

  9. @Tasniem – yes, that’s correct — just press the same keys again, and it’d revert back to normal.

  10. thank you for this info. I let my 20 month old daughter play on my mac laptop once in awhile…and she does some amazing stuff…including this key stroke combination.

    I went running around preferences for 20 minutes before deciding I should scour the net a little. found this in 10 seconds….should have started here.

  11. @Howe – wait until she ask for her own Mac πŸ™‚ she’ll surpass you in no time.
    .
    Glad to be of help !

  12. I never use mac OS but I’m a linux user. Maybe it’s like with ctrl+alt+F2 on linux command. Sorry if I wrong because I’m newbie πŸ˜‰

  13. A few weeks ago I heard a quite amusing summary of Windows, Mac OS and Linux, it read something like this; Ò€œLinux is for developers, Mac OS is for GFX designers and Windows is for playing solitaire!Ò€. πŸ™‚ hehehe

  14. Firefox is getting slower and slower. IÒ€ℒm using Google chrome instead, because I find Firefox slower and itÒ€ℒs affecting my work as a content writer.

  15. To many people have been touting how the Mac is immune to Viruses and more secure than the PC. Many are even advocating the greater expense of the Mac for this very reason. In the March, 2008 issue of the ABA Journal there is an article regarding PC versus MAC in regards to cost, security and usability.

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