Ubuntu – How to increase the font size in Dash

Unfortunately, the current answer is: you cannot (unless you figure out and modify the source code).

In this answer, I list the ways which do not work, to save future reader-modders the time and trouble of trying and failing.

A. Existing bug report

• Bug #756845 ("Unity dash search unable to change font/icon size") refers to this exact problem, as shown by part of the screenshot for the bug report:

  

• The bug has been confirmed and labeled "low importance", with no comments by developers or anyone else on a workaround or when it will be resolved.

B. Changing fonts or the scaling factor in gnome-tweak-tool

• This does not work either:

  

• Changing the scaling factor appears to change everything BUT the dash/hud font size (that's a 1920x1080 screenshot below -- compare the terminal font size!):

  

C. Editing dash-widgets.json in the Unity Theme folder

• You can find a file called dash-widgets.json in /usr/share/unity/5/ and /usr/share/unity/themes. This contains a bunch of CSS-like settings that may give you hope, such as:

    "preview-heading-small"  : {
  "main-title-size"    : 23.0,

  but changing them does not work. (the Dash font is approximately size 22)

D. Changing the Launcher Icon size Doesn't Affect It

• Since the dash text field is almost exactly the height of the Ubuntu launcher icon, you might think decreasing the icon size would change the height of the text field and make its font smaller.

  • Changing the icon size is easy from the Unity Plugin in CompizConfig Settings Manager (ccsm), or from its MyUnity frontend:

  

  • But decreasing to the minimum, 32, doesn't change the dash font size!

  

EDIT: Ubuntu 14.04 sort of supports high resolution screens and allows you to scale the panel and launcher with a simple slider under System Settings -> Displays. It's still a bit buggy: it doesn't work for some apps like Spotify doesn't scale and Thunderbird don't scale icons and the content of the emails.

So while Ubuntu took a giant leap forward, the below solution is still the only fully functioning way of scaling everything on Ubuntu.

You can scale everything with xrandr but the result is not as pretty as it could be if there was true high resolution support.

To scale your resolution, first find the name of your display with xrandr:

lars:~$ xrandr
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1366 x 768, maximum 1600 x 1600
LVDS connected 1366x768+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 344mm x 194mm
   1366x768       60.0*+
   1280x768       60.0 +
   1280x720       60.0 +
   1024x768       60.0 +
   1024x600       60.0 +
   800x600        60.0 +
   800x480        60.0 +
   720x480        60.0 +
   640x480        60.0 +
DFP1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
CRT1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)

So, in my case my laptop display is called LVDS.

Then run the following to scale your resolution:

xrandr --output LVDS --scale 0.75x0.75

The Launcher and Panel might disappear for a moment, but just hover your cursor over them and they should reappear. You might also have to resize any open windows so that they fit the smaller resolution.

I wish there was true high resolution support that was this easy to configure. Sadly even GNOME 3.10 seems to only support changing the font size, even though GNOME handles that a lot better than Unity.