HiDIP

[usernamefoo]

I was unable to find to find any information about running minsky on a HiDPI display.
Does minsky have any options to scale it up (comand line or gui)?

[highperformancecoder]

Minsky is not aware of the resolution of the screen it is writing to. It basically works in floating point coordinates, and relies on the underlying graphics library (Cairo) to translate that to the screen. I'm aware that Windows does some funky rescaling on hi resolution monitors, but I'm unable to see what effect that has as a) hi resolution monitors cause me eye strain on my current computer hardware, and b) my windows environments are limited to a virtual machine, and an older surplus laptop, neither of which have hi res display (FHD at best).

That said - on Windows, the primary monitor is queried for its scale factor, and this is used to adjust both the electron notion of a scale factor and font sizes are adjusted accordingly. It does seem to work when setting the scale factor to 150%, for example, on an FHD monitor. On non-Windows platform, this scalefactor is hard coded to 1, as ideally Minsky should not be aware of the monitor scaling factor either.

In model/renderNativeWindow.cc, the monitor's scale factor is queried, and stashed in the canvas:

double RenderNativeWindow::scaleFactor()
{
#ifdef WIN32
  DEVICE_SCALE_FACTOR scaleFactor;
  GetScaleFactorForMonitor(MonitorFromPoint(POINT{0,0}, MONITOR_DEFAULTTOPRIMARY), &scaleFactor);
  return int(scaleFactor)/100.0;
#else
  return 1;
#endif
}

and gui-js/apps/minsky-electron/src/app/app.ts (yes path name is a mouthful, don't blame me, this is apparently a standard path layout for angular apps:

    let displayScale=backendSync('minsky.canvas.scaleFactor');
    App.application.commandLine.appendSwitch('force-device-scale-factor', displayScale.toString());
    // invert the effect of display scaling on canvas fonts.
    backendSync('minsky.fontScale', (1/displayScale));

[usernamefoo]

Thanks for the info, it helps, but it would be great if the scale factor could be manually set on the command line and/or the gui:)

[highperformancecoder]

I'm not sure what the use case is. You can set the monitor display factor in the Windows settings panel. Why would you want minsky to treat it differently?

[usernamefoo]

Changing the monitor display factor would effect every program running. I would just like to scale minsky while not effecting other running programs. Or am I missing something/

[highperformancecoder]

On Wed, Feb 04, 2026 at 09:25:10PM -0800, usernamefoo wrote: ●usernamefoo left a comment (highperformancecoder/minsky#603) Changing the monitor display factor would effect every program running. I would just like to scale minsky while not effecting other running programs. Or am I missing something/

You can zoom in on the canvas, most easily via a mouse scroll wheel, but you can also use the zoom buttons. The remainder (buttons and menus and the like - why would you want to scale these independently of the monitor scale)?

…

--

---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders ***@***.*** http://www.hpcoders.com.au ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

[usernamefoo]

minsky seems to be ignoring the Gnome scaling factor so everything is super tiny. For now I'm able to use run_scaled from xpra. It's ever so tiny bit laggy and the fonts get that overly aliased blur look to them but it works pretty well. I was just hoping to scale without using xpra.
run_scaled --scale=2 minsky

[highperformancecoder]

On Wed, Feb 04, 2026 at 10:03:56PM -0800, usernamefoo wrote: ●usernamefoo left a comment (highperformancecoder/minsky#603) minsky seems to be ignoring the Gnome scaling factor so everything is super tiny. For now I'm able to use run_scaled from xpra. It's ever so tiny bit laggy and the fonts get that overly aliased blur look to them but it works pretty well. I was just hoping to scale without using xpra. run_scaled --scale=2 minsky

Ah, yes. Display scaling is only accounted for on Windows. On other platforms, display scaling is simply taken to be 1. I didn't know that these other platforms also did display scaling, which I always assumed to be a Windows oddity. If you can figure out what code to put in renderNativeWindow.cc for Linux (maybe an LLM will help for that) to extract the current display scaling, and do a pull request, it'd be a great help. As I said, I won't be able to test the code, except for making sure it works normally on an FHD monitor with no scaling. Cheers

…

— Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or unsubscribe. You are receiving this because you commented.*Message ID: <highperformancecoder ***@***.***>

--

---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders ***@***.*** http://www.hpcoders.com.au ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

[usernamefoo]

I might give it a shot. I still think an cli argument would be helpful.
With all these HiDPI screens I think very thing has scaling these days.
Here is a screen shot with firefox, minsky, and minsky through xpra.

[highperformancecoder]

It appears on Linux, scaling is handled differently, depending on whether you're using Gnome, KDE, or xrandr on the old X11 servers. Of course there's the old Wayland vs X11 mix as well.

I think with my last upgrade a week ago, I'm probably running Wayland now. A number of X11 utilities I used to use have disappeared, so I've been learning the equivalents in the brave new world.

Maybe we can support KDE and Gnome scaling, perhaps by calling out to another executable at program startup. I did find the KDE setting panel had a "global scale" option in "Display Configuration", but it didn't seem to do anything on my system. I don't use either Gnome or KDE, but do have KDE installed "under the hood".

[highperformancecoder]

Re adding cli arguments, the logic for this will appear in that same app.ts file mentioned earlier. There are some other cli arguments processed.

To make things a little easier, there might not be any need for you to compile the C++ part - if you're comfortable in typescript and the node environment generally, you can install minskyRESTService.node (the C++ compiled part) from your installed Minsky into the gui-js/build directory, then hack the typescript code to your hearts content.