Gnome Text Auto-Scaling

Simple script to automatically scale up text if the builtin display of a laptop is turned on. Adjusts Gnome's text-scaling-factor based on built-in display status.

• Built-in display active: text-scaling-factor 1.25
• Built-in display not active: text-scaling-factor 1.0

This behavior can be easily adapted/extended by editing gnomeautoscale.py. Also, the script and systemd service is only tested under Arch Linux so far.

Requirements

• Python
• Python packages:
  • PyGObject
  • pydbus
• systemd (if you want to run it as a user service)

Running

python gnomeautoscale.py

Install as User Service

./install.sh

This copies files to

~/.bin/gnomeautoscale.py
~/.config/systemd/user/gnomeautoscale.service

and enables and starts the script as a systemd user service 1.

Control the service with

systemctl --user status gnomeautoscale
systemctl --user stop gnomeautoscale
systemctl --user start gnomeautoscale
...

When the service fails to start because dbus is not up yet, it will restart every 5 seconds until it is successful. This is not optimal and potentially could be improved by using systemd dependencies.