How to Magnify Text Under Your Cursor on Mac (Hover Text)

Menu labels, tiny grey timestamps, six-point legal text in a dialog — instead of leaning in, hold Cmd and let the Mac hand you a large-print version. Hover Text renders whatever sits under your pointer in big, crisp type, and it works on menus, buttons, and labels that no page-zoom can reach. Setup takes two minutes on macOS 13, 14, and 15.

Turn on Hover Text

1. Open System Settings → Accessibility → Zoom.
2. Turn on Hover Text.

That's the whole setup. Now hold Cmd and point at any text: a banner appears with the same text rendered large. Release Cmd and it vanishes. Because Hover Text re-renders the actual text rather than magnifying pixels, the result is perfectly sharp at any size — crisper than screen zoom ever gets.

It works in places that surprise people: menu bar menus, Dock icon names, button labels, System Settings toggles, filenames in Finder, even the tiny text in password dialogs. If macOS knows it's text, Hover Text can enlarge it.

Customize the trigger, size, and look

Click the info button (ⓘ) next to the Hover Text toggle to open its options:

• Activation modifier — Cmd is the default; switch to Ctrl or Option if you keep triggering it during shortcuts. Pick the key you least often hold alone.
• Text size and font — the default is large; you can push it much larger and choose any installed font. A heavier weight reads better at speed.
• Text entry location — where the banner appears when you type into a field with Hover Text active.
• Colors — set the text, insertion point, background, and border colors. High-contrast combinations (yellow on black, white on dark blue) are popular for low-vision use.

One option worth memorizing: triple-press the modifier key to lock Hover Text on. Locked, the banner follows your pointer with no key held — ideal for reading a long email in large print. Triple-press again to unlock.

It works while you type, too

Hover Text isn't just for reading — with it active, clicking into a text field shows your typing in the same large banner as you enter it. That's what the Text entry location option controls: where the live large-print echo of your typing appears on screen. For anyone who can see well enough to find a field but strains to proofread nine-point input text — form fields, spreadsheet cells, terminal commands — this is the quiet second half of the feature. Combine it with the activation lock above and you can fill in an entire form reading nothing but comfortable large type.

Where Hover Text beats the alternatives

macOS has several magnification tools, and they're complements, not rivals:

• Hover Text wins for reading interface text — menus, labels, buttons — because it re-renders text sharply instead of blowing up pixels.
• Screen zoom (in the same Accessibility → Zoom pane) wins for images, video, and layouts — anything that isn't text.
• Page zoom (Cmd + = in browsers) wins for reading whole articles, since it reflows the page.

If your real issue is that everything is too small, also consider a larger scaled resolution in System Settings → Displays — Hover Text then becomes the tool for the stubborn leftovers.

Turning it off

Flip the same toggle off in System Settings → Accessibility → Zoom. Nothing else to clean up — Hover Text leaves no files or background processes behind. If you use it rarely, leave it enabled: it costs nothing until you hold the modifier key, and it's one of those features that quietly earns its keep the day a designer ships eight-point grey-on-white text.