So, I switched to using i3 as my daily driver about a year ago after using Cinnamon almost exclusively. It’s been great! I love it! Made me try a bunch of other WMs but now I’ve settled.
One thing I noticed but didn’t really care about is the fact that the text for some apps - dunst, dolphin, etc. - is bigger in i3. Meaning if I set the text size to 10 in both Cinnamon and i3, the text is visibly 2 or 3 font sizes bigger on i3 even though I set it to the same size.
Is this normal?
As I said, it’s not an actual issue, but I’d like to know if I’m doing something wrong.
Also the font config in i3 is just for the window titles and i3 bars if you are using that. It won’t affect anything else.
And if you have configured the fonts correctly as per this, it might be due to scaling. desktop environments usually use fractional scaling and other scaling, i3 doesn’t support it as of now as far as I know.
Strangely enough, even though dunst has an independent config, it still responds to the different environments with text at different sizes. It may just be fractional scaling like you mentioned. But what is very strange about it is that I set the font to Open Sans 8 (which is very small), and yet my notifications look like they are at a font size of 12.
As for qt5ct, I have been using it, but without setting the environment variable as mentioned in the wiki. Didn’t know I also needed to do that. Will try it to see if anything changes.
If you had configured fonts etc in qt5ct and passed the argument to the program
i.e: dolphin --platformtheme qt5ct
It should pick up the settings.
I have just put: export QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=qt5ct
in my ~/.xprofile as I’m using lightdm and it sources this file upon login.
Remember to always put environment variables that are needed for graphical applications in ~/.xprofile or ~/.profile as they are not limited to stuff inside a terminal.
And just a tip, if you want to configure the same for qt applications run as root just launch the qt5ct app as root and configure there, that will work on root qt applications too if you had set the environment variable in your current user i.e ~/.xprofile or ~/.profile
There are other ways to set environment variables for graphical applications too but I use this method.
per user and if you run i3 using a DM… best way is to use ~/.xprofile
with this: export QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=qt5ct and use qt5ct to set the wanted font and size (e.t.c.)
Do you mean it causes an issue if I use it or if I don’t use it?
To confirm: I used it for both qt5ct and qt6ct… But I didn’t use it initially and have always had this problem. Only used it for the first time a few days ago when I decided to try to fix the font size.
