Subject: Re: bug#51361: 28.0.60; NS toolbar icons are too big and low res

From: Carlos Pita <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2021 14:07:24 -0300

> Or perhaps this could be an effect of viewing the OP's screenshot,
> presumably taken on a high-resolution display, on my ordinary FHD
> display.

In my MacBook I set the scaling factor to 2x, although the default is
about 1.75x since a few years ago. I also have an external monitor at
1.75x, here I would expect some slight blur because of the non-integer
downscaling but I'm not sure whether my screenshot was taken from this
screen (or even if the downscaling should affect it in any way).

Nevertheless, on what matters the example provided by Dmitry and mine
are the same: excessively scaled icons. Additionally, in macOS these
icons are part of the titlebar so they feel odd and too big compared
to the GTK toolbar, which is just an old school toolbar with large
icons. Look at the large padding around traffic lights. If the GTK
port were using CSD people would probably complain about a thick
titlebar, as they often do because of Adwaita defaults. This is why I
suggested tackling both problems by showing the icons at 1x, although
I understand Alan concerns about this.

Small rant: Wouldn't it be preferable to hide the toolbar by default
in hidpi screens, or in macOS, until the icons are replaced with
properly scalable versions, which might take a long time? I can't see
any positive trade off in showing something like what's in my
screenshot first thing. This is not about making emacs look "modern"
by default, but just less awful, I would go as far as to call icons
scaled at twice their intended resolution a bug. Fringe pixmaps are
tolerable because at their tiny size the problem isn't actually that
visible. There are other places where small lores icons are shown, but
not often. The toolbar, instead, is big and permanent and many people,
including newcomers, disable it (I think this is a fairly objective
statement since "modern emacs distributions" targeted to newbies hide
it OOTB, although it's true that they might add alternative discovery
mechanisms, not to say that I believe the toolbar is incredibly
helpful in that regard).

Best regards,
Carlos