Spyder interface icons very small on high resolution screen in Windows 10

Question

I got a brand-new laptop with a resolution of 3840 x 2160 running Windows 10. After I installed Anaconda + Spyder for python coding, I noticed that the icons are extremely small, as well as the text on the Object Inspector section:

Is there a way to fix this? It seems closely related to the resolution as it is also happening with Eclipse.

PS: The Eclipse workarounds includes lowering resolution which is far from ideal. I was wondering if this can be fixed maintaining the resolution settings.

Camiecamila

I'm having this problem too on Spyder3/Python3. On the object inspector screen you can right-click and click zoom. I still haven't fixed the menu button icons though they are way too small. This is an extremely common problem with many applications running in Windows 10 there has been very poor quality control. – Kylstra

It looks like they will soon have this fixed: bountysource.com/issues/… – Kylstra

Answer 1

(Spyder maintainer here) Please use the screen resolution options provided by Spyder to fix this. They are present in

Tools > Preferences > Application > Interface > Screen resolution

for Spyder 5

Tools > Preferences > General > Interface > Screen resolution.

for Spyder 4 and

Tools > Preferences > General > Appearance > Screen resolution

for Spyder 3.

Pisciculture

The Screen Resolution preferences don't work for me in Windows on a Surface Book 2. The "enable auto high DPI" setting gets the icons and the code window right, but text in the Spyder UI is too small to read. If I click "set a custom high DPI setting," and type in a number, there's no number where all text and icons are correctly scaled. – Heterogenetic

Tools > Preferences > Application > Interface > Screen resolution for Spyder5 – Lionfish

@B.A., you're right. I updated the answer accordingly. – Pisciculture

Honestly guys, unlike other profession, if computer professionals did not have stackoverflow or other communities, it would waste millions of hours everyday with just troubleshooting. Thanks @Carlos Cordoba for the solution. – Landpoor

Answer 2

I know this question is old but I ran into the same problem. I fixed it by adding

[Platforms] 
WindowsArguments = dpiawareness=0

to qt.conf in my Anaconda3 installation folder (C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\Shared\Anaconda3_64, as it is part of my MS VS installation).

Contributor

I spent almost four hours searching across dozens of threads, and this is the only thing that worked. Looks like the issue really is with QT, after all. Thank you so, so much! – Spoondrift

As a small addition; to find your install directory, you can follow these steps for Windows machines: https://mcmap.net/q/188070/-where-does-anaconda-python-install-on-windows/11627783 – Spoondrift

I only feel the need to comment in addition to upvoting when I've spent more than an hour struggling with something. That definitely applies here, and this did the trick! Thank you! – Chavannes

Answer 3

Sorry, can't comment on Djerro Neth's answer above, so here goes:

I did his suggestion of adding

[Platforms]
WindowsArguments = dpiawareness=0

and this sort of solved the issue for me. However, the whole UI looked blurry. So I closed spyder, changed dpiawareness to 1

[Platforms]
WindowsArguments = dpiawareness=1

...and, voilà, everything looks just right.

Weird.

Nutwood

Answer 4

There's an easier solution. Right click the Spyder shortcut - Properties - Compatibility - Change high DPI settings - High DPI scaling override - select it, change it to "System"

Shannon

Answer 5

None of the above methods worked for me. However, a simple reboot of my machine did.

Befoul