Skip to content

Text Scale & Interface Scale

If the editor is hard to read on your display (a Retina MacBook, a 4K monitor, a TV across the room), there are two settings that make it bigger. Both live in Edit → Preferences → Appearance.

Setting What grows Sharpness Use it when
Text Scale Text and icons only. Panels and spacing mostly stay the same size. Always sharp: fonts are re-drawn at the new size. The layout is fine but the text is too small.
Interface Scale Everything: text, icons, buttons, padding, panels. Magnified like a zoomed image, so it gets soft at large values. Everything is too small, typically on a HiDPI display.

They can be combined. A good recipe for a HiDPI screen is to set Interface Scale so buttons and panels are a comfortable size, then nudge Text Scale up a little if you still want larger text.

Changing Text Scale

  1. Edit → Preferences → Appearance.
  2. Drag the Text Scale slider (0.75 – 2.0), or Ctrl + Click it to type an exact value.
  3. Press Apply. The editor rebuilds its fonts, which takes a fraction of a second.
  4. Reset returns to 1.00.

Nothing changes until you press Apply, so you can drag the slider around without the interface jumping under your mouse. The value is saved as soon as you apply it; you do not need the Preferences window's own Apply / OK buttons for this setting, and Cancel will not revert it.

Text Scale affects the whole editor, including the Terminal panel and the built-in script editor.

Known limits

  • A few controls have fixed pixel widths. At large scales some labels can be clipped, for example in narrow dropdowns. The main toolbar and the Preferences window already grow with the text scale; if you find a control that does not, please report it.
  • Text drawn inside the viewport by the game itself (stats overlay, on-screen log) belongs to the running scene, not the editor UI, and is not affected.

Changing Interface Scale

  1. Edit → Preferences → Appearance, or View → Interface Scale for the quick version.
  2. Drag the slider (0.5 – 3.0), or Ctrl + Click to type an exact value such as 1.25.
  3. Press Apply.
  4. Reset returns to the default for your display: 1.00, or the display's scale factor (usually 2.00) on a Retina Mac.

The slider shows two decimals and Ctrl + Click lets you type, so landing on exactly 1.00 no longer depends on a steady hand. If the interface ever ends up unusably large or small, Reset in either location fixes it in one click.

Interface Scale is stored in the project's Config.ini (EditorInterfaceScale=), so it travels with the project. With no project open the new scale still takes effect, but only until you close the editor, because there is no Config.ini to write it to. Text Scale is stored with your personal editor preferences and applies to every project you open.

macOS / Retina

On a Retina display the editor starts with Interface Scale set to the display's scale factor (2.0 on most MacBooks), because the engine works in physical pixels and the UI would otherwise be half size. If that default still reads small, raise Text Scale to 1.15 – 1.3 rather than pushing Interface Scale higher: text stays crisp and you keep more room for panels.

Where the settings are stored

Setting File
Text Scale Appearance.json (textScale) in the editor preferences folder
Interface Scale Config.ini (EditorInterfaceScale) in the project folder

Editor preferences folder:

  • Windows: %APPDATA%/PolyphaseEditor/Preferences/
  • macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/PolyphaseEditor/Preferences/
  • Linux: ~/.config/PolyphaseEditor/Preferences/

If a bad value ever stops the editor from being usable, close it and delete the textScale line (or the EditorInterfaceScale line) from the file above; the default is used on the next start.

Related: Themes / CSS for colours and the editor font. Contributors: see Editor Text Scaling internals.