# What controls the window+icon size? (vlc and others)



## PMc (Jul 1, 2021)

The short version: 
After restarting X, the window appearance (including everything, the menu bar, buttons, handles etc.) of vlc (and also qjackctl) is suddenly zoomed to double size and occupies lots of the screen. It just happened, there is apparently no knob that would influence this.

The long version:
I somehow managed to drop my maglite onto the screen panel. It didn't like that. So goodbye, beautiful big WQHD screen. 
I ordered a new one. Meanwhile I found an old 1280x1024 and put that on the desk alongside with the server console monitor, and figured out how to make them work together from xorg.conf.
Today I got a new WQHD. I added it to the config, put the server console back at it's place, left the other one as secondary, and restarted. And then it happened - qjackctl had become horribly big. At first I thought that had somehow happened because I hard-resetted the machine after changing the monitors. So after tuning all the font and icon options in the config to their minimum value (with no success) I restored all possible dotfiles from backup (with no success). Then I figured that vlc is also concerned. Firefox, gimp etc. are not.

I removed the new monitor from xorg.conf - and the appearances are back to their normal sane size!

I have all dbus or devd or udev or whatever deliberately switched off when compiling xorg - for exactly that reason: I don't need unsolicited AI interaction that appears to know what is best for me. Now I wonder what is going on. The xorg.conf is creepy (to put it mildly); it appears to be a matter of luck to get what is wanted, and I do not see a precise logic of what is taken from the config and what X decides on it's own (definitely too much). The monitors can also talk back to the X (and tell it whatever weird stories). And now the applications seem to have a means to get some information out of that and autonomously change their appearance. This is way to weird to properly understand it...


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## aragats (Jul 1, 2021)

I'm not sure how Xorg decides in each case, but usually I just play with .Xresources, e.g.:
	
	



```
Xft.dpi: 120
```


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## astyle (Jul 1, 2021)

According to the Handbook, Xorg should not require truckloads of config... just delete your xorg.conf file altogether, and reboot.


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## T-Daemon (Jul 1, 2021)

I had the same problem in the past, QT application menu icons and window abnormally big on a HIDPI screen. The QT GUI can be scaled to normal size with the following two environment variables:


```
QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR 0
or
QT_SCALE_FACTOR 1 ( eventually a smaller value: 0.n )
```

For me the first variable worked.


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