Open Radar

 
As I get older, my eyesight is getting worse. Font sizes in in apps continue to get bigger and Xcode is no exception.

The Xcode preferences allow you to specify font sizes for the editing text, but these settings don’t do you any good in other parts of the user interface. For example, there is no way to adjust the size of the font in inspector panels of the Asset Catalog or Interface Builder Storyboard. If you can’t read 12pt San Francisco, too bad.

Even in the text editor (for both source code and playgrounds) where text is resizable, the error and warnings on a line are hard to read unless you make the editing font *really* large. I have my editing font larger than I’d like just so I can see errors and warnings. As far as I can tell, the size for errors and warnings is about two points smaller than the text font size, so to get a readable error message at 12pt, I have to edit text at 14pt. Yuck.

There are also contrast problems with error messages: the text is too light and the background is too dark. There are already plenty of signifiers that you’re looking at an error message: just show text on a normal background (or frame the text in a red box if you really want to have some color there.)

These issues are becoming more of an issue with my increased use of Swift and Playgrounds. Swift does a lot more type checking and Xcode shows a lot more errors. The text of these errors are a more integral part of the editing process, so they need to be as readable as your source code.