Documenting how to make Medley's window or text bigger

[pamoroso]

Some new users with large screens ask how to make the window or text of Medley bigger, see for example here and here.

Since this may be a FAQ it would help to document how to do this such as the --geometry and --screensize options of medley and the -pixelscale option of Maiko.

[MarceColl]

It would also be nice to tell about the draw buffer limitation, since there is an upper limit on how big the screen can be due to limitations in the VM.

[khinsen]

Yes, please provide some documentation for common cases!

I tried to run Medley on my 13" Dell laptop running Debian 12. Everything works fine as advertised, but I need a magnifying lens to read any text on the screen.

I found many discussions about this problem, but no obvious solution. Some people say I should recompile with SDL instead of X, so that I can use the -ps option, but there are no instructions. Others say I should use xrandr but provide no instructions nor a working example. There are hints that using VNC would allow scaling, and VNC actually works, contrary to what the installation instructions say, but I have no idea how to profit from VNC for scaling.

[pamoroso]

In this post I explained how to build Medley from source with instructions for X11 and SDL. Once you build for SDL try this command:

medley -a -e -n -ps 2

The command launches plain Medley (i.e. no VNC) and doubles the pixel size with -ps 2. Depending on your screen you can try other scaling factors such as 3 or 4.

I use Medley with VNC but I have no idea whether TigerVNC supports scaling, and how. I don't run TigerVNC directly as I use the medley script to drive the VNC server and viewer with the default options.

[khinsen]

Thanks, I will try those instructions!

[pamoroso]

@khinsen Did the instructions work for you?

[khinsen]

@pamoroso No, the scaling factor had no effect. That's why I started working on compiling Medley myself, via Guix, in order to have a better understanding of how it works and more buttons I can turn for experimenting. Then summer vacations happened... I need to get back to this!