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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.

Ryan
  • 401

1 Answers1

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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
Ryan
  • 401