Why is my main toolbar so big?

Hi Guido,

Does the problem go away if you temporarily disable all of the non-bundled plugins and restart the IDE? File | Settings | Plugins | ⚙ | Disable all downloaded plugins

Another thing to try is resetting IDE settings to defaults (a backup copy will be created in the process): File | Manage IDE Settings | Restore Default Settings

Disabling plugins did not change anything - resetting IDE to default settings did. I'll describe it here.

Settings A (original post's screenshot)
It appears that the problem is caused by the left side of the toolbar. Both the “VCS Widget” (under Git), and the “Project Widget” (under Other) cause the toolbar to grow in size as shown. If I remove both, the toolbar is normally sized.
 

Settings B (after reset to default)
With default settings, I have a single bar at the top. There is no menu bar (File, Edit, View, …). The main toolbar includes the VCS and Project widgets. In this view, the bar is normal sized, but the repository name and branch name are misaligned and visually jarring (they are below the midline of the toolbar).

Settings C
From B, I change a setting to show the menu bar permanently (File, Edit, View, …). The main toolbar is now shifted down, and becomes a bit bigger than before. Not as big as in A, but bigger than in B. Now, the repository and branch names are aligned along the midline of the toolbar.

Now, I'd like to go back to settings A, to have my IDE set up correctly again. Where in the menu options, or settings, can I find the switch that determines the height of the widgets?

Guido J sorry, I'm not aware of any settings that change the toolbar height directly. That might be some scaling issue (e.g. icon or widget reserving too much space). 

To help us to identify the root cause please share the following details:

- settings backup saved after you restored the default IDE settings (there should be a folder named like "IntelliJIdea2024.2-backup\2024-10-23-15-14 in the IDE configuration directory)

- complete IDE logs captured via main menu, Help | Collect logs and diagnostic data.

You can use our upload service to share diagnostic info, just let us know the upload ID. Thank you!

Thank you, here is the diagnostic info:
Upload id: 2024_11_13_1F37cMXq8Ey8iwzC59d3wN (files: 2024-11-13-16-26.zip, idea-logs-20241113-16283918302254855923259011.zip)

After resetting to defaults, I tried a few more things.

It appears the toolbar height is affected by at least:

1. Presence and absence of specific widgets
2. Presence of the fixed menu bar
3. Theme. The smallest toolbar is the Dracula theme, then the Dark/Light theme, and the biggest is in High Contrast
4. Other. Even with these three settings the same, it is not showing up the same before/after the reset. The best outcome is Dark theme after resetting to defaults. Even with default settings, High Contrast makes the toolbar much bigger
   
   
   
    

Guido J sorry, I failed to unpack the 2024-11-13-16-26.zip archive, could you please re-pack it and upload once again?

My bad - zipping on Ubuntu, by default, generates a zip format that can't be read by Windows… here it is:
Upload id: 2024_11_14_28KWG6cAvkTyd4J3TkFqDb (file: IntelliJIdea2024.3-backup.zip)
 

Guido J  thank you and sorry for the long silence.

From what I see, there were customizations applied to the main toolbar. They are not visible on your screenshot, but the configuration  file (options/customization.xml) reflects them. Some actions have custom icon assigned, and I suspect that something went wrong with the icon cache. The wrongly sized IDE icon at the top of the window confirms that too. We've faced similar issues before, see e.g. IJPL-49462. Unfortunately, such things are hard to investigate because the scenario usually involves zooming the IDE in/out, changing the display layout or font size, and the cache might be broken at any point. 

If you see the same issue again, you can try deleting the icon-cache-v*.db file from the IDE system directory instead of restoring the default IDE settings. 

Thank you for getting back. It's not a huge issue, but it is a small daily nuisance as I'm often working on an already small laptop screen. I've checked the config directory (mine is at /home/guido/.cache/JetBrains/IntelliJIdea2024.3) and found the icon-cache DB file - deleting this hasn't had an effect. I cannot find an `customization.xml` file, neither under the above folder, nor in my project's `.idea` folder. 

One further difference I noticed, is that when hovering over this bar, the offending items light up in blue across the entire height. For comparison, the other buttons are closely wrapped - 

Guido J could you please share your HiDPI info? It can be captured as follows:

1. Invoke Find action with `Ctrl+Shift+A` or `Shift-Shift` and tab to Actions.
2. Type "Show HiDPI info" and select the found action.
3. Make a screenshot of the appeared window and attach it to your reply.

These are my HiDPI info:
Per-monitor DPI-aware : disabled
Monitor resolution : 3840x2160
Monitor scale : 2.5
User (IDE) scale : 2.5
Xft.DPI : 240
GSettings scale factor : undefined
GDK_SCALE : undefined
GDK_DPI_SCALE : undefined

My monitor is a 15" laptop screen at 4k, set to 200%. When I set the monitor to 100% and restart IntelliJ, both the monitor scale and User (IDE) scale drop back to 1.25. At 100% monitor, the main IDE icon is better sized and the toolbar size relative to the rest of the IDE also seems a tad smaller, although it still takes up blank space:

I can also set the IDE scaling under Accessibility → Zoom. Here is my monitor set to 200% as before, with IntelliJ zoom set to 70%. (Something similar happens when I change to a smaller font size in the same settings panel.)

What I conclude from this, is that the IntelliJ scaling settings seem to work correctly (they scale everything proportionally), but an OS-level scaling setting makes the icon and the bar scale disproportionally. Unfortunately I'm too old to work at 100% on my small 4k screen! ;-)

Guido J thank you for all the details provided, I reproduced the issue and filed a ticket to our tracker. Please upvote IJPL-173013 and follow it for updates, see this article if you are not familiar with YouTrack.

Sadly, I could not find any acceptable workaround for this. It seems that insets in some components are calculated incorrectly. This does not happen when the menu is merged with the toolbar and shown as a burger, you might want to try that—disable Show main menu in separate toolbar option in the toolbar's context menu. But there is another unpleasant effect: toolbar buttons may be shifted to the bottom.

Sorry for not being able to assist further. If you have any other questions, feel free to ask.

Hi Ekaterina, no problem at all and thank you for taking the time. Glad it's reproduced and I'll keep an eye on the issue. Best, Guido