Building Eclipse IDE from scratch - making bigger

Question

Even the newest Eclipse Neon edition has still somewhat small icons on a 4k display. That is why I'm trying to make them bigger. I resorted to building the Eclipse IDE from scratch for that purpose.

Please read this StackOverflow question to see how I did that:

Building Eclipse IDE from scratch - how to choose CDT over JDT?

I wrote a Windows batch file that runs through all the folders and changes the size of every icon it can find. In my batch file, I presume that every .png , .gif, .bmp, .jpg and .ico file with dimensions below 48x48 pixels is an icon. And I double the size.

I run that batch file just before starting the build.

I get mixed results. The figure below shows that some icons do get much bigger - but others don't. Take for example the debug icon. It looks like its dimensions are still the old 16x16 pixels. Maybe my batch file was not complete, and it somehow skipped that one. So I check the eclipse sourcecode folders and find the debug icon. It is 32x32 pixels! So my batch file was correct. Why doesn't the eclipse build use it correctly?

Any help would be much appreciated. If I succeed to make all icons larger, I promise to share the solution with everyone (and mention your contribution) :-)

I believe the small Eclipse icons are a real pain for all people with high dpi displays or those people who are not blessed with eagle eyes. Developing code should not be a privilege for those with sharp eyesight - it should be accessible to all.

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PS: I've got some other questions related to the Eclipse "Build from scratch" topic. If you're interested:

• Building Eclipse IDE from scratch - how to choose CDT over JDT?
• Building Eclipse IDE from scratch - how to specify the target OS?
• Building Eclipse IDE from scratch - making bigger icons sometimes successful

Let us all unite to build the Eclipse IDE ourselves - and tweak it to our needs ;-)

Answer 1

https://github.com/davidglevy/eclipse-icon-enlarger#eclipse-icon-enlarger : Icon enlarger software (zip folder).

Answer 2

In Eclipse Neon, you can add following VM argument in the eclipse.ini or on the command line after -vmargs to double the size of all icons (see Tweaking SWT's auto-scaling):

-Dswt.autoScale=200

This will use the *@2x.png icons if available:

Answer 3

From the screen shot I believe you are running with 100% scaling factor on 4k screen. You can specify the scaling factor to 200%. The scaling in eclipse is controlled by this. In Neon only multiples of 100% scaling factors supported. With this you'll see all drawing code and images scaled. If you need even bigger put the scaling factor to 300%, 400% etc. We have only 2x images available. You may see the images blurry on higher scaling factors. But the graphics like lines rectangles does work properly.

in Windows 7 go to Control Panel\Appearance and Personalization\Display and use custom dpi settings to 200%(if it is not available, on 4k 200% should be available by default).

in Windows 10 go to customize display and set the slider "Change size of text, apps and other items" to 200%.

This will make the eclipse scaleup. You need to restart eclipse after changing these settings. I suggest logout and login again to get this change to full effect.

If this did not help please raise a bug against platform SWT with [HiDpi] tag.

P.S. I spent considerable amount of time to make these icons scaled on high dpi monitors. You should not be required to scale up the icons. Swt does the work for you. What is required is setting the correct scale factor in the display settings