Make “Headless” Raspberry Pi VNC Open in 1080p

So, you’ve installed Raspberry Pi on your first board, figured out its IP address, enabled SSH, enabled VNC, connected to it “headless” from your computer. That’s exactly what I did following this wonderful tutorial from guys at Atomic Object. And…you see this:

That’s quite a throwback in resolution to the early 2000s. At least that’s exactly what happened to me. Definitely can’t develop much on this screen.

There are lots posts online showing how to change the resolution of the VNC connection, but many of them are outdated and multi-step complicated. After poking around some, I found the following simplest configuration edit to do the trick and go back into the present of 1080p+ displays.

While on the Raspberry Pi, do the following:

1. Open the Terminal (shortcut in the task bar)
2. Run sudo nano /boot/config.txt
3. Cursor down to the following lines and uncomment them by removing the pound sign #

4. Change width and height to 1920 and 1080 (or whatever you prefer)

5. Press CTRL + X on your keyboard and type Y + ENTER to save and exit nano

6. Run sudo reboot in your terminal to reboot Raspberry Pi and enjoy the proper resolution.

Enjoy!