Eclipse interface icons very small on high resolution screen in Windows 8.1

I figured that one solution would be to run a batch operation on the Eclipse JAR's which contain the icons and double their size. After a bit of tinkering, it worked. Results are pretty good - there's still a few "stubborn" icons which are tiny but most look good.

Eclipse After Processing on QHD

I put together the code into a small project: https://github.com/davidglevy/eclipse-icon-enlarger

The project works by:

  1. Iterating over every file in the eclipse base directory (specified in argument line)
  2. If a file is a directory, create a new directory under the present one in the output folder (specified in the argument line)
  3. If a file is a PNG or GIF, double
  4. If a file is another type copy
  5. If a file is a JAR or ZIP, create a target file and process the contents using a similar process: a. Images are doubled b. Other files are copied across into the ZipOutputStream as is.

The only problem I've found with this solution is that it really only works once - if you need to download plugins then do so in the original location and re-apply the icon increase batch process.

On the Dell XPS it takes about 5 minutes to run.

Happy for suggestions/improvements but this is really just an adhoc solution while we wait for the Eclipse team to get a fix out.


I struggled with this issue for a little bit too. I noticed a lot of you posted really complicated resolutions but there is a much easier way to do this! Its just a program and you shouldn't have to modify scripts, or install third party tools. The issue is related to High DPI scaling as mentioned above but what I think a lot of you are missing is that you can't directly modify compatibility settings on the launcher itself. The launcher and eclipse are two different programs! You need to browse to the Eclipse.exe and override the High DPI scaling option there. Once set, you can use the launcher as normal. The launcher will hit the executable, launch the eclipse.exe and since you set the compatibility settings on the .exe it will run using those settings. I spent like 10 minutes tracking down where the exe was so if its any help mine was located in: C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Yatta\Launcher\installations\eclipse-ide-for-java-developers\eclipse.exe

Here is a screen shot of how I set my compatibility settings.

Eclipse.exe compatibility settings

And yes, the icons were super small before adjusting this setting. I tried setting compatibility settings on the launcher itself but it obviously didn't fix the issue. But after setting the override High DPI setting for the eclipse.exe icons are now normal size. Let me know if this works for others!