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Ryan
Asked: 2021-11-30 08:24:03 +0800 CST

How to toggle between 2 specific resolutions via keyboard shortcut?

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I'm using Ubuntu on a laptop (with its built-in screen disabled) connected to a 3840x2160 external display.

Before sharing my screen on a video chat, I always like to switch the resolution down to 1920x1080.

I want to be able to quickly toggle the resolution of my external display between 3840x2160 and 1920x1080 via a keyboard shortcut, such as SuperPrntScrn.

This really old answer might be relevant as a starting place, but I'm not sure where to go from here.

As an example (but not on Ubuntu), I was able to do it on a Macbook following this answer.

shortcut-keys

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    This answer was more helpful than I originally realized.

    1. In Ubuntu 20.04, go to Settings → Displays.
    2. In the Resolution dropdown, count the position of the resolution options that you care about. (In the screenshot below, "3840 x 2160" is 1st, and "1920 x 1080" is 7th.)
    3. In Terminal, xrandr -s 0 -r 30.00 will set the system to use the 1st resolution at 30 Hz (or 29.98 Hz actually, somehow), and xrandr -s 6 -r 30.00 will switch to the 7th. Test those commands.
    4. vim toggle_resolution.sh and paste the sample bash script shown below (and edit as necessary).
    5. chmod +x toggle_resolution.sh
    6. Run ./toggle_resolution.sh a couple times to test the toggling.
    7. You could create a hotkey in Settings → Keyboard Shortcuts to run that bash script file.

    Settings → Displays

    Sample bash script:

    #!/bin/bash

# https://askubuntu.com/a/1351112/48214
X=$(xrandr --current | grep '*' | uniq | awk '{print $1}' | cut -d 'x' -f1)
# echo "$X"

if [ $X == 3840 ]
then
        xrandr -s 6 -r 30.00
else
        xrandr -s 0 -r 30.00
fi
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