Some OS X screen savers, especially complex third party screen savers, can eat up a good amount of CPU and GPU horsepower. This also means that, by default, this change doesn’t persist after rebooting your Mac or logging out, although you can work around that limitation by creating an Automator action to execute the script and setting it to automatically run when you log in to OS X. If you quit Terminal or close the window with the screen saver background command, your screen saver will instantly disappear and you’ll have your old static wallpaper image back. First, this trick requires that the Terminal window in which you entered the above command remain open. Pretty cool, right? Unfortunately, there are two caveats you should keep in mind. Unlike a normal screen saver, however, the animation will play behind your desktop icons, interface, and windows, just like a standard wallpaper image. You’ll see your default static desktop wallpaper image immediately replaced by your screen saver. Next, launch Terminal (located in the Applications > Utilities folder), copy and paste the following command, and press the Return key on your keyboard to execute it: /System/Library/Frameworks/amework/Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/ScreenSaverEngine -background Whichever one you choose, just make sure it’s selected as the active screen saver, even if you have it set to never start in the “Start After” duration drop-down menu.

To use a screen saver as your desktop background, first head to System Preferences > Desktop & Screen Saver > Screen Saver and select one of the screen savers included in OS X, or a third party screen saver that you’ve previously installed. How to Set a Screen Saver as the Desktop Background in Mac OS XĪpple has long offered users a wide variety of beautiful, high quality images to use as desktop wallpaper, but if you’d like something even more interesting on your Mac’s desktop, you can use a Terminal command to set one of your Mac’s animated screen savers as the background instead.

Presentation screen saver mac