I’m using Kate 26.* on MacOS 15.7 with a 4K monitor. The default UI text is quite small and hard to read.
With other Qt based apps, I have been able to set variable values in the theme CSS file in order to remedy this - usually QT_SCALE_FACTOR or QT_FONT_DPI depending on the app. Currently I’m launching Kate via Automator which uses a command line invocation that sets the environment variable QT_FONT_DPI=100 and it works great; but I’d like to configure Kate to do this on startup so that I don’t need to use a script to launch it.
I’ve looked into this for a while and can’t find a theme or XML file which Kate reads to set the Qt variables. Am I overlooking something obvious, or does this not exist? The standard .theme files don’t support font size, only colors.
That just increases the buffer font size. It doesn’t scale the UI text at all, which is the issue. The QT_FONT_DPI environment variable (e.g.) changes ALL fonts, including the UI. This then allows me to set the buffer font size independently, which is effectively scaling the UI without making the buffer font too large. But the only way I know to do that requires passing the value to a script instead of changing a setting.
Yeah I realized that only after writing the reply, my bad. The only way I can think of is maybe creating a .app wrapper since you’re on Mac? But yeah nothing internal to Kate
If you’re launching it from the KDE launcher just modify the .desktop file to include the environment variable.
If you’re launching it from the terminal either create an alias in your .bashrc or .zshrc or similar; or create a ~/.local/bin/kate.sh script to launch Kate with the environment variable.
Sorry about the delay - I’ve been on a business trip. I was initially launching Kate by just double-clicking the app file, but of course that doesn’t pass any environment variables to the binary. After some experimenting I’m now launching it using an Automator wrapper, which passes the Qt settings and works fine. Since I’m not expecting any other processes to launch Kate, I can live with having a special way to run it.
