Category: MuleSoft

Correcting Anypoint Studio Display Scaling (Windows)

On a recent reinstall of Anypoint Studio I found the IDE really doesn’t scale well on some external monitors, but luckily there is a simple fix…

Recently I had to reinstall the MuleSoft IDE, Anypoint Studio (v7.12.1), on a clean Windows build and I noticed when I started Studio that it looked very “big” on my external monitors compared to my laptops screen. The icons were big, the text was big and all that extra space they take up means you just cant’ see as much at once. Either you have to make your palette, explorer, properties (etc.) panes so much bigger that they encroach on your flow design pane or you just accept that they get truncated.

With default scaling, the text and icons are massive, meaning you either expand the palette, explorer and properties panes to show the content, reducing the space left for your actual design work, or you have a LOT of scrolling to do any time you want to find something in those panes.

For context, the laptop was a Surface Laptop 3 which had just been “migrated” back from Windows 11 to Windows 10. According to wiki, that means the 13.5″ internal screen has a resolution of 2256 x 1504, at 201 PPI. Since my external monitors were 22″ with an HD (1920 x 1080) resolution, I assume this is caused by Eclipse (which is the base of Anypoint Studio) not adjusting correctly when I move Studio from my main, internal display to the external monitor.

How to fix the scaling issues in Anypoint Studio

There is a fix to this, although it’s not perfect. The display seems to be much better if you override the “High DPI Scaling” behaviour for Studio. To do this:

  1. Find the AnypointStudio.exe file in your Studio home directory, right-click and open Properties.
  2. In the Compatability tab, under the Settings section click “Change high DPI settings”
  3. In the dialogue that pops up, tick the “Override high DPI scaling behaviour” box and select “System (Enhanced)”.
Using the System (Enhanced) High DPI scaling option gives you much more sensibly sized text and icons, enabling you to see more at any one time and have that vital extra real estate for your flows. In this image the flow pane is a little bigger where I’ve reduced the size of the other panes around the edge, but you can also fit much more in those edge panes. If I were to reduce the size of those panes to show the same content as before you’d have even more room in your main design pane, but this seems like a good compromise.

Et voila. It does produce this interesting tiling in the splash image when you’re loading up Studio, which is not inconsistent with MuleSoft’s general approach to testing Studio on Windows I suppose, but that is significantly preferable to the default “giant text and icons” on the external monitor.

Anypoint Studio splash screen, tiled in a 2x2 layout.
This fix/workaround does solve the display issues in Anypoint Studio but this ‘bug’ in the splash screen does rankle a bit!

If you’ve found another way to resolve this issue please let me know in the comments.