[stavros]

Not only does it look OK to me, but the UX is second to none. I don't like the modern design trends with white space everywhere, I want to communicate and that means dense information.

I think the design issue is more of an HN meme these days, than an actual problem.

[KronisLV]

Most of the time I also enjoy pretty dense UIs, as long as I don’t have a significant risk of misclicking on things that are too small.

That said, I rather liked what Thunderbird and JetBrains did - let the user choose not only the fonts and stuff like that, but also the UI density that they want.

[price]

That is in fact one of the new features in this 9.0 release! There's a new less-dense default, and the previous dense layout remains an option (which for myself I immediately turned on).

We're also planning to give a wider array of options in an upcoming release, including independently setting the line-height and the font size. It's a lot of work to get even two options to both have a reasonable layout throughout the UI, though (among other things, it involved changing a lot of hardcoded values in px to be in relative units), which is why only the two-way switch made it into this week's release.