Using Xastir on screens that are not tiny
Xastir Version 2.2.4 now starts up for the first time with a window that is
70% of your monitor's size rather than a fixed, tiny window size.
If you have multiple monitors configured to behave as one large X
desktop, even this default behavior might be undesirable as the
initial window will then be enormous and span your monitors. In
such a case, you can either just manually resize the window after
startup or use a -geometry option to pick something that fits in one
monitor.
Older versions of Xastir behaved differently
Prior to release 2.2.4, Xastir's default behavior was different, and
was designed to help users with very small screens (think Raspberry
Pis with small flat screen displays) to use the code. These older
versions will start up with a very small window (590x420 pixels) by
default, and the station configuration dialog will be even smaller and
have scroll bars so you can get to all its fields.
In fact, all dialog boxes wind up being initialized to something
smaller than the main window, and wind up having scroll bars.
This is great if you have such a small screen. But if you have a
large monitor this can be annoying startup behavior. You can
override Xastir's default behavior by specifying an initial geometry
that is more reasonable for your monitor. For example,
xastir -geometry 1280x960 &
After the initial startup, Xastir remembers what window size you
used last and starts up again at the same size so you only need to
do this once.
Users of 4K and higher resolution monitors might need to scale Xastir
Xastir is not optimized for high-density, high-DPI monitors, and was
pretty much written when 92DPI displays were the best there were. If you
have something like a 4K display, you may find Xastir's display so
tiny you can't read it, even if you use the "-geometry" trick to make
it bigger.
You have several options. The hamfisted way to do it would be to use
a scaling option that tells your display manager to zoom everything in
to double size. Most systems have such an option.
Another option is to use a package called "xpra" that includes a
script called run_scaled. Without getting into the details of how
xpra actually works, this script allows you to run Xastir
so it displays at double size, but leaves all the other applications
at normal size. Install "xpra" from
https://github.com/Xpra-org/xpra/wiki/Download and run Xastir as:
run_scaled --scale=2 xastir -geometry 1920x1080
to get a nice, big window that is scaled up to fit your massive,
high-resolution display.
Note that this script is only present in versions of xpra after
version 4.1, the current version is 6.4.3. Almost all distros have
outdated versions in their package management systems, some years out
of date and some with serious security flaws. It is better to install
the package from the xpra distribution channel and not from your
system's package manager. See
https://github.com/Xpra-org/xpra/wiki/Download and
https://github.com/Xpra-org/xpra/wiki/Distribution-Packages (for all
the reasons you shouldn't use your distro's packaged version).
