unable to change i3wm scaling

Question

I've installed Ubuntu 16.04 on a new laptop. When it logs in I have to change the scale for menu and title bars to 2 in the screen display menu, so the system icons and text is not super tiny. I want to start using the i3 window manager but have the same problem when I log in, the status bar along the bottom is so tiny as to be illegible. How can I change this in i3wm? I've tried changing it with gsettings but with no success, and the gsettings appear to be the same in i3wm as they are in Unity after I've rescaled.

Solution

The release notes for i3 4.8 cover this:

Also very important for owners of HiDPI/“retina” displays is that i3 will now respect your configured DPI and scale up its UI elements accordingly. Use “xrandr --dpi 184” to set your dpi to 184, in case your setup does not figure it out automatically. To get properly scaling fonts, we also changed the default font from a bitmap font to a pango font (“DejaVu Sans Mono 8”).

Comments

[bordeltabernacle]

Thanks, but it didn't have any effect.

[bordeltabernacle]

this only worked after I put it in a .xsessionrc file in my home dir.