UI doesn't respond to Windows scaling

[3ternal]

There's one problem that I've noticed with a lot of smaller Windows apps, and I never quite figured out what causes it.

In Windows 10's Display Settings, if you change the scaling to something other than 100%, this app doesn't seem to adjust with it. Below is how it appears at 175% scaling (note that the text is blurry).

And here's how it looks at 100% scaling.

(Desktop scaling is useful for 4k monitors, otherwise the icons and text become way too tiny).

Most programs are able to account for this, but I've noticed that a lot of FOSS/freeware programs become blurry instead of scaling correctly (even large FOSS projects like GIMP and Inkscape suffer from this, if I recall correctly).

Is there a reason why scaling never seems to work correctly? It would be a major UI improvement if it were possible to get this working, but I'm guessing there's some reason why it isn't as easy as it looks.

[mcmonkey4eva]

Scaling in this case would mainly be the job of Windows Forms to do properly (KeyboardChatterBlocker's UI is just a default WinForms app with content added), and Microsoft didn't implement their own scaling system into winforms.

So... the reason most FOSS UIs don't scale would be we don't make our own UI libs and instead just trust the big corps to make libraries to work properly within their own software, but, uh...
I imagine a modern WebUI setup would scale properly (ie one that just embeds an entire fat web browser to display a UI with html/css/js) albeit with the downside that embedding web browsers tends to eat massive amounts of RAM and a few percent of CPU at idle.

[3ternal]

I see, thanks for the explanation.

Yeah, that makes sense - I can see why embedded web browsers keep showing up in desktop apps, even though it really shouldn't be necessary. Very unfortunate that Microsoft didn't handle this properly, but at least I know why it happens now.