This is horrible on a 4K monitor
Answered
I upgraded my desktop PC to have a nice 27" 4K monitor. Now at at native resolution, 3840x2160, every application is too small on the screen to read. Hence, visiting the Display Settings in Windows 10 and choosing a High-DPI setting of 150% scale factor works well. This makes apps like Visual Studio, Word, and most legacy apps designed for lower res screens to just work without additional adjustments.
But on PyCharms (as well as any other JetBrains IDE), the app ignores the DPI setting. It just renders 12px high text that can't be read. The workaround is to change the default font setting for the editor. Then change the default font size for the console window. This mostly fixes everything except the title bars to most inner windows, buttons, and menu items are still too small to read. I have to squint to read it.
Is this being fixed anytime soon?
But on PyCharms (as well as any other JetBrains IDE), the app ignores the DPI setting. It just renders 12px high text that can't be read. The workaround is to change the default font setting for the editor. Then change the default font size for the console window. This mostly fixes everything except the title bars to most inner windows, buttons, and menu items are still too small to read. I have to squint to read it.
Is this being fixed anytime soon?
Please sign in to leave a comment.
Yes, it is horrible indeed and I assume it is quite hard for JetBrains to solve this.
Over the years JetBrains created awesome IDEs but the UI platform they are all based on stems from pretty old technology: Swing. This technology is not bad at all and even today it is great for the scenarios it was designed BUT when Swing was designed there was no such concept for 4K monitor, 1024x768 was pretty big resolution even at the time when Swing specification stopped to get any updates. And Swing had no updates since 2006.
As a result, today tools that are not even IDEs like Visual Code and Atom scale their UIs as easy as Ctrl +/- because their UI is based on web technologies which has the concepts to scale on any device with any screen resolution.
Too pitty.
Ref:
https://superuser.com/questions/988379/how-do-i-run-java-apps-upscaled-on-a-high-dpi-display
https://www.reddit.com/r/java/comments/49ip70/java_swing_is_tiny_on_hidpi_displays_what_can_be/
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15659044/how-to-set-the-dpi-of-java-swing-apps-on-windows-linux
When I made that original post in **2015**, high resolution monitor and high DPI support was bad. IIRC, I used some environment variable and Java configuration settings as a decent workaround. Can't remember.
But today, handling of high dpi and higher res displays is much better with the latest updates from Jetbrains and the latest Windows 10 updates. I might need to tweak the font sizes in the IDE's settings panel for the main editor window, but after that, I'm typically got a configuration that works well.
Yes, it is horrible indeed. Please fix this.
Hi everyone,
These issues seem to be about the same problem https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-196221, https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-202813. Please feel free to vote for them and follow or submit another one if your issue is different and attach idea.log (Help | Show Log in...).