Per-application GUI scaling?


Your best bet is to retain the 200% and keep the horizontal screen rotation mode active. When the application window is too large, set the Librem 5 smartphone on physical horizontal alignment. This method is probably the most compatible in user interface accessibility, readability, and navigation.

The small amount of vertical room is already too small even at 100% scaling, and at 200% scaling NoScriptā€™s menu still fails to open even in horizontal mode due to not enough room. So for me, that is even less of a solution than my current strategy of leaving everything at 100% and changing to 200% from time to time.

In that case, I suggest that the Firefox SSR is not as smartphone or mobile phone/device compatible in terms of user interface usability. Surely, thereā€™s a browser out there that is GNU/Linux and smart/mobile phone screen compliant.

I was thinking GNU IceCat (despite the restrictions), but maybe that choice is a bit minimal/basic for modern consumer tastes. I was also thinking of application launchers (from XFCE desktop environment) for custom applications. Anyways, I am getting off-topic. End of this post.

Oh yeah, the horizontal lockscreen could be problematic for continued computing! Involving scaling, you got a point right there! Screen rotation seems to be a matter of discipline. That, or set the Blank Screen parameter value to ā€˜Neverā€™ so you donā€™t have to deal with undesirable time-based operations. I canā€™t say about the power button, but certainly, a menu would be preferred (plus deactivating screen rotation mode until thereā€™s enough scrolling for 200% scale of horizontal lockscreen [update required!]).

I suggest using angelfish. It is fast and efficient

Angelfish is fast and fits the L5 screen well. I uninstalled both Firefox and Gnome web in favour of Angelfish.

Oh, and Angelfish is the only browser (of these three) that allows me to do my banking; the others did not get past the login protocol. Maybe itā€™s down to the user agents it deploys. I havenā€™t checked the details.
And it allows you to create ā€˜web appsā€™ - like Gnome Web, and unlike Firefox.

It still works.

The main killer app for this phone for me is the ability to run full desktop apps without as much compromise as on Android. So, a more mobile-optimised browser would defeat one of the best, most important use cases I can do with this phone: run full, desktop-class Firefox with inspect element and tree style tabs. Iā€™m thinking there might not be an existing software solution to exclude only certain applications for scaling, so, does anyone know which programs I might modify to implement this functionality? Is this at its core controlled by the Phoc compositor maybe, or something else?

Which specific codebases would I need to patch?

Interested here, iā€™m trying to gather data how to dev for librem5, would be nice if you could supply some links

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Lets start with the most obvious: https://developer.puri.sm/Librem5/ and https://puri.sm/contributing/ and https://source.puri.sm/Librem5

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For Firefox, maybe set universal, or per-element, scaling in userChrome.cssā€¦ ?

Per-app scaling could maybe be accomplished with a script, e.g. a script that first sets scaling, then launches Firefox (or other app), then reverts scaling on close. Make the script a desktop application.

(Sounds good, anyway. :wink: )