Bug 422567

Summary: Make everything in KRunner a little bit bigger to increase the speed of interaction
Product: [Plasma] krunner Reporter: William Kendrick <nbs>
Component: generalAssignee: Kai Uwe Broulik <kde>
Status: RESOLVED FIXED    
Severity: wishlist CC: alexander.lohnau, anditosan1000, dashonwwIII, katyaberezyaka, leftcrane, nate, nortexoid
Priority: NOR Keywords: usability
Version: 5.18.5   
Target Milestone: ---   
Platform: Other   
OS: Linux   
See Also: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=356446
Latest Commit: Version Fixed In: 5.23
Sentry Crash Report:

Description William Kendrick 2020-06-07 06:58:28 UTC
SUMMARY:
Ability to configure font and icon size in Krunner, for users with vision problems.

This Reddit thread describes a way to override the font use by Krunner, by manually editing krunner's config file -- https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/cpsz6h/how_to_make_fonts_in_krunner_bigger_how_to_make/ 

However, there doesn't appear to be a way to alter the icon size.  (This thread on the Manjaro Linux forums discusses how to do this for the system tray, again by altering a config file, in this case "plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc" -- https://forum.manjaro.org/t/increase-the-size-of-tray-icons-kde/12449/5)

It would be nice if there were options to set the font and icon sizes via a GUI.

SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS:
Linux/KDE Plasma: Kubuntu 20.04
KDE Plasma Version: 5.18.5
Comment 1 Alexander Lohnau 2020-06-09 19:01:04 UTC
In the source code there is `units.iconSizes.small` used, but changing the small icon size for "Small Icons" in the system settings didn't change it. I am honestly not an expert in regards to these framework units etc.

To give you a workaround:
Edit the /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/qt5/qml/org/kde/milou/ResultDelegate.qml file. There you change the PlasmaCore.IconItem item (lime 191+) and add a factor to the width and height:
> Layout.preferredWidth: units.iconSizes.small*1.5
> Layout.preferredHeight: units.iconSizes.small*1.5
Then restart krunner:
>kquitapp5 krunner;kstart5 krunner
And you should have bigger icons :-)
Comment 2 William Kendrick 2020-06-13 18:05:58 UTC
Thanks Alex, that did the trick. (I've been using "krunner --replace", rather than quit/restart, but it seemed to work fine.)

It'd be excellent if this could be configurable in the future, so I'll leave this 'wishlist' ticket open.
Comment 3 Alexander Lohnau 2020-06-14 21:40:29 UTC
It is added to my TODO bookmarks list ;-)
Comment 4 Alexander Lohnau 2020-06-28 05:12:47 UTC
*** Bug 411713 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 5 Alexander Lohnau 2020-07-13 08:14:50 UTC
*** Bug 421934 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 6 Nate Graham 2020-08-24 19:30:13 UTC
Yeah, you're running into the problem that increasing the font size doesn't increase icon sizes. Past a certain font size, the text is huge and the icons are tiny. This looks quite bad.

In general, the correct way to make everything on the screen bigger--fonts and icons alike--is to use the screen scaling feature in the KScreen KCM. For example setting it to 125% scale will make everything on the screen 25% bigger. In face, In Plasma 5.20 (or maybe 5.19, I can't remember), the Fonts KCM will gently nudge you in the direction of the KScreen KCM if you try to set a humongous font.

However there is one remaining issue with using the screen scaling feature in the KScreen KCM: on X11, this does not yet use Qt Scaling, so the icons *still* are too small! This is Bug 356446. To work around that, you have to set the PLASMA_USE_QT_SCALING=1 environment variable in the environment when plasmashell starts up, or use Wayland, where it works properly. I have been fixing bugs with that mode and have submitted a merge request to turn it on by default, which will finally fix the issue once it lands: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/merge_requests/139

I am tempted to mark this as a duplicate of Bug 356446, because fixing that and having users use the screen scaling feature should address the visual impairment use case, for which the correct solution is to make *everything* on the screen bigger, not just KRunner. I don't really see the use case for making KRunner itself huge but keeping everything else in the system small.

However I will not because there seem to be several non-visually-impaired people who want KRunner to be just a little bit bigger in general to increase the speed of interaction I'm sympathetic, but I think if we want to accommodate those people, we should just increase the default sizes and not make this configurable. Down that road lies madness. :)

However even for the people who want everything to be a little bit bigger, I would encourage them to try using a fractional scale factor to make *everything* a bit bigger as I strongly suspect that the whole UI being too small is the true problem. See also https://phabricator.kde.org/T13158.
Comment 7 Michael D 2021-04-27 13:35:27 UTC
I'm one of the people that would like to see slightly larger icons. Helps also for touchscreens.

I would have thought that krunner inherits the icon size from the configurable value of "Small Icons" under the icon settings (under "Configure Icon Sizes"), but it doesn't. Does that only affect, more or less, the icon size on buttons?
Comment 8 Nate Graham 2021-04-28 16:45:36 UTC
Most things don't, these days. That method of scaling things up is sort of deprecated and mostly unused these days. It's scheduled to be removed in Plasma 6.

We could conceivably move from small icons (16px) to smallMedium icons (22px) to make list items a bit taller by default. This would also make list items broadly more consistent in size with other Plasma and Kirigami list items.
Comment 9 Bug Janitor Service 2021-05-04 15:26:32 UTC
A possibly relevant merge request was started @ https://invent.kde.org/plasma/milou/-/merge_requests/28
Comment 10 Nate Graham 2021-06-02 21:02:28 UTC
Git commit aef14f05c994d71db290511ac26864b1073470a6 by Nate Graham.
Committed on 02/06/2021 at 21:01.
Pushed by ngraham into branch 'master'.

Make results delegate list items a bit taller with bigger icons

We generally use the smallMedium (22px) icon size for
small-ish-but-not-too-small icons as they have a better visual balance
with adjacent text, compared to the small (16px) icon size. 22px icons
also generally look better than 16px icons. Moving the results list
items to use smallMedium icons offers a better visual balance, and
adding a tiny of vertical padding  balances out everything a bit more
to provide more "breathing room" between the rows.

As a consequence, the maximum number of results visible at once has to
decrease a bit, but this is generally not a major problem as the user
can simply keep typing to refine their search to find what it is they're
looking for.
FIXED-IN: 5.23

M  +6    -5    lib/qml/ResultDelegate.qml
M  +1    -1    lib/qml/ResultsView.qml

https://invent.kde.org/plasma/milou/commit/aef14f05c994d71db290511ac26864b1073470a6