All things mac and macOS

Oh yeah, and I just realized I've been a dum idjit and completely forgotten to mention the slightly hacky way you can enlarge some UI fonts that might help y'all @[email protected] & @[email protected].

You may be familiar with this already, but by editing some system preference keys "manually", you can crank up the default font sizes that apps, the OS, and some native UI elements use beyond what System Settings lets you do – both allowing for bigger font sizes in apps and the OS itself (but which can lead to UI bugs), and allowing changing eg. label or tooltip font sizes separately. This can only work for native apps, but even then sometimes it only sort of works at best and especially SwiftUI seems to just completely ignore these (because of course it fucking does).

You can either use Tinkertool which also allows you to export and import the current state of all the configs that Tinkertool manages, and that's pretty handy when you're fiddling with your configs. It does eg. limit the system font size to max 24 for whatever reason though, so if you want to go over that limit you can hop in the Terminal and use defaults to add/change the preferences:

(All of these take an int value)

• NSFixedPitchFontSize
• NSSystemFontSize
• NSMessageFontSize
• NSLabelFontSize
• NSToolTipsFontSize
• NSTitleBarFontSize
• NSPaletteFontSize

So for example to set the system font size to 15, you'd use defaults write -g NSSystemFontSize -int 15
If you want to restore the default value I think it's enough to just delete the key(s) you've changed: eg. defaults delete -g NSSystemFontSize.

Caveat emptor, though: this is of course completely unsupported and you'll probably run into UI funk depending on which sizes you change and by how much. For example NSLabelFontSize defaults to 10, and I've increased it to 12 which mostly works but some labels can get truncated if the label's container doesn't scale with the label font size which many apps assume will never change. It's definitely not an ideal solution or even a good one by any means because UIs do kinda start borking once you change these too much, but might be worth a shot anyhow?