[8456523]

My visual acuity varies, so I benefit a lot from software that lets me change the size of the elements on the screen. The typical Mac app allows the user to change the size of the text in the main pane, but everything else is a fixed size. In contrast, all the Electron apps I've tested give the user an easy way to change the size of everything, e.g., all the icons in all the panes.

If I had found a way to change the size of everything on one of the Lua-based editors on the Mac, I probably would've switched years ago to one them. (I don't recall their names.)

If I stay with Emacs it will be because learning how to modify vscode, e.g., by writing my own extension, proved too difficult. (I want my editor to be a general interface to information that is easy for me to modify by writing code.)

[TeMPOraL]

You can change size of elements in Emacs too. Hint: 99% of what you're looking at is text, so it boils down to changing font sizes. Emacs already has commands for zooming content in a frame, which work like +/-/0 in a web browser.

[8456523]

Thanks for clarifying something I failed to explain. The relative ease with which I can change the size of most of the elements in Emacs is the reason I didn't switch to, for example, Textmate or to Sublime Text when those editors appeared on my radar. Emacs, terminal emulators, Plan 9 port, Chrome and apps based on Electron are the only apps on the Mac I have been able to figure out how to change the size of most of the elements of.

"most of": The size of the menu-bar and pop-up menus is fixed in all of those apps when they are running on a Mac, but Apple made the text in them large and legible enough to suit me.

Setting the scaling to a fractional value in System Preferences doesn't count because the result is too blurry. I never obtained a monitor with a horizontal resolution of at least 2560, which is the minimum needed to set the scaling to 2 in System Preferences.

[mbrumlow]

I use emaca and can easily increase the seize of everything. I often do when training other devlopers.

I use a 4k monitor and with a C-x +++ everything is bigger by 3x. I can set it permanently too.

What is vscode doing different?