Sway: Blurry font rendering hidpi

[jarias]

4k screen
Scale factor 2

Sway

i3

[cafehaine]

xwayland, swaybar and swaylock don't support native scaling at the moment. If you want a crisp font for your terminal, you can try and switch to a native wayland terminal, such as:
-weston-terminal
-germinal
-wlterm
-hawaii-terminal

Hope this helps!

[jarias]

@psgarsenal Thanks for the info, that was my guess, do you know if xwayland will have scaling support eventually that's a big show stopper for me at least, since I still use a lot of apps that don't support wayland yet. This is the only ticket I found https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=93315.

[cafehaine]

It's on a per-toolkit / per-application basis, gtk can be scaled via an environment var for example.
This means that there is no global solution for now, but we might see one in the future
You can see more in the arch-wiki page about HiDPI:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HiDPI

EDIT:
By the way, this is more of a wlc issue than sway, since the scaling on the wlc side

[stapelberg]

Do I need to do anything to make weston-terminal support hidpi?

With sway 0.9 and wlc 0.0.5, I added output * scale 2 to my ~/.config/sway/config, but all fonts are still blurry — it looks like the applications were rendered at low-dpi, then scaled up:

For comparison, this is what I expect it to look like (from i3):

I tried creating ~/.config/weston.ini with the following contents:

[output]
name=eDP-1
scale=2

…but that didn’t change anything either.

[ddevault]

weston-terminal might not support HiDPI. If you're looking for a term that does, try gnome-terminal.

[ddevault]

Oh, and the window decorations and bar are known limitations in sway's HiDPI support. See #797

[stapelberg]

Using gnome-terminal indeed works.

I was originally trying weston-terminal because it was recommended in https://github.com/SirCmpwn/sway/issues/829#issuecomment-237478787

[ddevault]

Ah. I wouldn't suggest weston-terminal for any purpose.

[cafehaine]

To be honest I did not test the scaling function, I just thought most native wayland applications supported scaling, which proves to be wrong

[ddevault]

swaybar, swaybg, and swaylock all support hidpi as of https://github.com/SirCmpwn/sway/compare/0913eff9157a...af441541197a

[stapelberg]

I can confirm that swaybar is now hidpi-compatible. Can we get window title bars next please? :)

[ddevault]

That's what I'd like to look into next. I actually missed a spot with swaybar I need to fix, though.

[ddevault]

https://github.com/SirCmpwn/sway/issues/797

[ghost]

How can I set Sway to hidpi mode? I am currently using on a 4k display and its pretty blurry.

[ddevault]

RTFM

[danielcb]

@stapelberg did you get rxvt to work without blurry fonts by any chance? I've everything setup and working quite well. Gnome-terminal is as sharp as it can be (hidpi, scale 2), but I can't get rxvt-unicode to render sharp fonts (Xft.dpi 282, antialias and the like are set already).

Edit:
Okay, after reading again, probably an Xwayland/scaling issue? mh.

[kaueraal]

@danielcb Yes, that's an Xwayland issue. This is somewhat tracked in #1047 .

[Inc0ns1st3nt]

Hi, is there any work around for blurry xwayland app in hidpi?