Keepass2: fix puffy ui and fonts

bgstack15 — Sat, 30 May 2026 12:59:00 GMT

It feels like the tech I wish to use wants to fight me. It's getting frustrating. (Or maybe I'm just getting old.)

I did a medium-dive into DPI on Linux again, because the Mono-based application keepass2 wanted to look really puffy and bloated. I have a 1920x1080 display, with no special scaling at all. I know I've had to tell QT applications what scaling to use, because they apparently guess wrong on basic 1920x1080.

Wrong view (bloated):

Right view (not bloated):

This time, for some dumb reason KeePass wanted everything to look like it's scaled up kinda big and puffy. The solution to this is to uncheck the setting "Force usage of system font (Unix only)."

The setting:

I don't know why it sometimes flips. Maybe it's like that other setting that magically changes.

Aborted research

GDK_SCALE=1 GDK_DPI_SCALE=1
xrdb -override <<< "Xft.dpi:96"
xrdb -query
MONO_MWF_NATIVE=1
MONO_OPTIONS="--debug"

Unhelpful references

Fix vlc ui scaling problems

bgstack15 — Thu, 11 Apr 2019 12:51:14 GMT

Vlc disable hidpi scaling

tl;dr

Set the environment variables:

export QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR=0
export QT_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTORS=1

The story

I am testing Fluxbox on Devuan on a physical system (instead of just a VM) with two monitors. I discovered that on one monitor, the ui for vlc is scaled way wrong. For my left monitor, the buttons are way larger than they should be. And on the other monitor, the buttons were normal-sized, but the menus and other text widgets were way too small. When I set the environment variables as described above, vlc appears in the correct scaling. At one point, I had some OS or DE installed that showed that my system viewed the left monitor (HDMI-connected) as a 7" screen with 1920x1080 resolution, which is why the scaling on the left side was messed up. Not only did I add those variable exports to my ~/.fluxbox/startup file, I also wrote a wrapper for vlc as /usr/local/bin/vlc

1 2	`#!/bin/sh QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR=0 QT_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTORS=1 /usr/bin/vlc`

I was not aware that VLC was a QT program. But, after setting some environment variables,

Knowledge Base (Posts about hidpi)