Panning screen at 1024x768

Sometimes I encountered the problem that I had a dialog on the screen which was too large for the display's native 1024x600 resolution. In windows the EeePC tools offer a panning mode that switches to a virtual 1024x768 resolution where the visible section of the screen follows the mouse pointer. So I thought it must be possible to do the same with xrandr. Some playing around with xrandr was a success. Searching for solutions of others led me to a convenience script:

#!/bin/bash

function pan-mode {
echo `xrandr --prop | grep "current"`
}

function pan-enable {
echo Enabling VGA output
xrandr --output LVDS1 --panning 1024x768
}
function pan-disable {
echo Disabling VGA output
xrandr --output LVDS1 --panning 1024x600
}

### MAIN ###
case $1 in 
on)  pan-enable ;;
off) pan-disable ;;
status)  pan-mode ;;
*)   echo "*usage: $0 on|off|status"    ;;
esac

Create an executable shell script in the bin dir:

1. gedit ~/bin/panning (then paste the script into the file and save)
2. chmod a+x ~/bin/panning

Now you can switch with panning on or panning off in the console.


If you want to make the panning default create or edit the file ~/.xprofile and add the following line to it:

xrandr --output LVDS1 --panning 1024x768

Next time you reboot or restart X the screen will be in panning mode.