This Mac tip is provided by Mark Greentree and was originally posted on Mark’s blog – Everyday Mac Support. For more of Mark’s tips visit his site, follow him on Twitter, or browse his archive of posts here.
How To: Screen Saver As Your Mac’s Background
Firstly, doing this is really a bad idea (but it is really cool). The reason why is it will use about 25% of available CPU performance just to present the screensaver in the background.
However, if you happy to sacrifice the performance drop or simply want to know how it’s done then I will show you.
In order to do this we will need to use Terminal. To locate Terminal simply navigate to your Applications folder then to the Utilities Folder. Within the Utilities folder you will locate Terminal.
Simply launch and then enter the following:
/System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/ScreenSaverEngine -background
(Please note the above is to be entered as one single line)
Upon pressing return your selected screen saver will be presented as your background as can be seen above.
Please note that this is not a permanent solution and upon quitting out of Terminal or pressing Control-C or restarting your Mac this will be disabled and you will need to re-enter the command to turn this feature back on each time you wish to use it.
