Editor’s Note: This tutorial was written and demonstrated for Mac OS X Lion 10.7.

Mac OS X Lion is supposed to combine what Apple learned from the Mac and what they learned from iOS, and put it all together in a grand display of Apple engineering and design at its best. One of the trivial features that they’ve added is the “zoom” effect that you get when you open new windows in the operating system, something that they took straight out of iOS. Although some people may find this feature cool, others may find it distracting, or for whatever reason, what to disable it. Here’s how.

In this tutorial, you will be using Terminal, a “command prompt” style app that is used to control the Mac using commands that you type. Have no fear, although Terminal may seem a bit intimidating, the code that you will be using today is completely safe, and will not harm your system in any way. Also, what you’re about to do is fully reversible, so if you want the zoom effects back again, we’ll be teaching you how to do that too.

So first, launch Terminal. If you can’t find it, a quick Spotlight search should do the trick. Afterwards, type in the following command to disable the zoom effects:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool false

Let the terminal do its trick, and you can test what you just did out by opening a new window, and you should see that the zoom animation is gone. If you want it back, understand that this is a “bool” command; basically, it has two options, true and false. In the code above, you changed the “NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled” to false, disabling, the animation. Just change it back to “true” with the following code:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool true

That’s it!