Scaling Icons in Eclipse

I work on a large (42″) 4k display .. yes, not really a monitor, but a nice HD TV with HDMI inputs. I absolutely love it as my primary work display.

My one issue is that within Eclipse, the icons are typically very tiny, with good way to scale them. I did come across this post here, but all of the solutions did not work for me (Ubuntu 21.10). With the swt settings changes, I had grossly malformed screens (black bars everywhere, making the UI completely unusable). The one solution in that post that did work, mostly, was the python scripting to actually scale up the icons. I got tired of launching a python shell to do this, though, and I wanted to poke at bash shell scripting again, so I came up with the following 2 scripts.

The first is “scaleImages.sh”; run from the root directory of your Eclipse install, this will scale the images by the configured percentage. Any image that is modified is backed up first (being moved to a renamed file, <original name>-orig.png). The script has commented out code to scale images that already have a 2x scaled version, too — for me, it didn’t make sense to scale those, but I wanted to leave it in the script just in case. The script also supports a list of exclusions, so images that already appear to be large enough (there are a few) aren’t resized (for these particular icons, I think a larger size looks terrible).

#!/bin/bash

function contains() {
  array=${@:1:$#-1}
  [[ "$array" =~ "${@: -1}" ]] && echo 0 || echo 1
}

scaledPercent="100%"
normalPercent="200%"

excludes=()
excludes+=( "new_wiz.png" )
excludes+=( "boot-icon.png" )
excludes+=( "opentype.png" )
excludes+=( "open-task.png" )
excludes+=( "search.png" )
excludes+=( "save_edit.png" )
excludes+=( "saveall_edit.png" )
excludes+=( "link_to_editor.png" )
excludes+=( "collapseall.png" )
excludes+=( "link_to_editor.png" )
excludes+=( "filter_ps.png" )

#echo ${excludes[@]}
#echo $(contains "${excludes[@]}" "new_wiz.png")
#echo $(contains ${excludes[@]} bar)
#exit 1;

for orig in $( find . -name "*.png" )
do
  # echo $orig

  backup=`echo $orig | sed 's/\.png/-orig\.png/'`
  scaled=`echo $orig | sed 's/\.png/@2x\.png/'`
  base=`basename $orig`  

  echo -n $orig $base" "

  shouldExclude=$(contains ${excludes[@]} $base)

  echo -n "shouldExclude = "$shouldExclude" "

  if [ $shouldExclude -eq 1 ]
  then
    if test -x $scaled 
    then
      # If a scaled version of the file exists, only scale by a smaller percentage
      echo " ... has enlarged, skipping scaling"
      # echo " ... has enlarged, scaling that by $scaledPercent"
      # convert $backup -resize $scaledPercent $orig
    else
      # Back up the file
      mv $orig $backup

      # Scaled version of the file doesn't exist, so scale by a higher percentage
      echo " ... no enlargement, scaling orig by $normalPercent"
      convert $backup -resize $normalPercent $orig
    fi
  else
    echo "... excluding because it's in the exclude list"
  fi

done

The next script is the necessary “reversal” script. If you should need to revert the images back to the original, just run this script. Any file with “-orig.png” will be moved back to it’s original name, restoring the Eclipse icons to their original size.

#!/bin/bash

for orig in $( find . -name "*-orig.png" )
do
  echo $orig
  new=`echo $orig | sed 's/-orig\.png/\.png/'`
  mv $orig $new
done

And there you have it. Perfect? No … probably far from it. I could do this in a single script, and restore via a command-line argument. This is good enough for now, though.