Xfce HiDPI Issues: App Scaling Flags Needed & Thunar Icons Oversized

General system Applications
1

Hi ,

I’ve followed the Arch Wiki’s HiDPI guide for Xfce to configure my HiDPI display While most tools (Terminal, WezTerm, GIMP, Emacs) scale correctly, two issues persist:

1. Chromium/Brave/Obsidian require manual scaling flags

Apps like Chromium, Brave, and Obsidian render with incorrectly large UI elements unless launched with --force-device-scale-factor=2. This suggests per-app overrides are needed despite global Xfce settings.

2. Thunar icons are excessively large

Thunar’s icons appear oversized compared to other UI elements (see attached screenshot). This occurs even after adjusting global icon settings in Settings Editor or via xfconf-query.

What I’ve tried:

Questions:

  1. App-specific scaling: Is there a way to avoid --force-device-scale-factor flags for Chromium-based apps? Could ~/.config/environment.d/*.conf with CHROMIUM_FLAGS work system-wide?
  2. Thunar icon size: How to permanently fix oversized icons? Are there Thunar config files (e.g., gtk.css tweaks) or plugins to control icon DPI independently?

Attached: Screenshot of Thunar’s oversized icons.

Thanks for your insights!

Screenshot_2025-07-08_10-09-44
Screenshot_2025-07-08_10-09-442832×1590 342 KB

2

Thunar - ctrl+‘+’ and ctrl+‘-’ change the icon size.

image
image1920×1080 366 KB

3

Have you checked the wiki already ?
https://discovery.endeavouros.com/desktop-environments/xfce-hi-dpi-screens/2021/06/

4

Thanks for the reply! It works in the right bottom panel, but the File Menu and left side panel does not work.

5

Have you checked the settings? At work will have a look later when home. If I remember, there is one for this.

6

Edit this file:

~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css

To change text and icon size globally within the Thunar app, including the main menu, write code like the following:

window.thunar * {
	font-size: 36px;
}
window.thunar image {
	-gtk-icon-transform: scale(2.5);
}

(My code above makes text and icons huge. Use a scale less than 1.0 to decrease your current icon size.)

You can override the global settings above for specific panes. Write code like the following for Thunar’s left pane:

window.thunar .shortcuts-pane * {
	font-size: 24px;
}
window.thunar .shortcuts-pane image {
	-gtk-icon-transform: scale(1.5);
}

Write code like the following for Thunar’s toolbar:

window.thunar toolbar * {
	font-size: 24px;
}
window.thunar toolbar image {
	-gtk-icon-transform: scale(1.5);
}

For changes to take effect, log out and log in again.

1 Like
7

image
image1920×1080 286 KB

Yup, there you go.

8

seems fixed, what I did:

  • settings → appearance → settings → window scaling 1x
  • manually change the icon size in thunar preferences page.

Now, the font and icon looks right

Thank you so much

9

Thanks, works great!

10

Works great ! Thanks!!

1 Like