Using Reaper on Linux with 4k can be quite frustrating. The menu font is very small by default and any googling for the issue usually suggests increasing the UI scale in Preferences. However this increases only the elements in the main section - everything but the font size of the menus, making you squint to change anything. I went through couple of iterations to get the best result.
Changing ui_scale in reaper.ini
The best way to change the whole UI scale is changing params:
1ui_scale=1.7 // scales the sizes in libSwell.colortheme
2ui_scale_auto=1 // set to 0 to disable system DPI detection (only used when ui_scale=1)
in ~/.config/REAPER/reaper.ini.
A weird gap may occur when performing scaling. You can resize it back by going to the first track and pull it up.
If you are already using Advanced UI tweaks scaling in Preferences, you may also consider reducing the values there as well, since the elements can become too big.
For fine tunning you can also modify the libSwell.colortheme file as described in the section below. It was also the best solution for increasing the font until I found the approach above.
SWELL toolkit
Reaper implements SWELL toolkit for changing the apperance of menus. We can copy paste the libSwell.colortheme to modify the values, by default the configuration directory is in
~/.config/REAPER:
1cp /opt/REAPER/libSwell.colortheme ~/.config/REAPER
to find out your config directory, go to Options -> Show REAPER resource path in explorer/finder ….
Then open the file (vim ~/.config/REAPER/libSwell.colortheme and change the font size, specifically:
1default_font_size 22
2menubar_height 27
3menubar_font_size 27
Restart Reaper and the font should be bigger. A new problem arrises: the spacing in dialogs is not big enough and text does not fit. At first I thought the config option is not present and after some googling found a bit outdated SWELL repo. However, I found the same issue by another member of community. It seems the best solution is still to use the ui_scale as describe in the section above.
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