Text Size (separate Desktop and Mobile text size)

What it is

Text Size controls how large all text (and the whole UI, which scales with it) appears. There are two independent settings:

• Desktop text size — the size used on the desktop app. This is the long-standing "Font Size" setting; the keyboard shortcuts Ctrl+= (larger) and Ctrl+- (smaller) step it.
• Mobile text size — the size used when you open Omniscio on a phone or a narrow touch screen, kept completely separate from desktop.

Both offer the same seven steps, from Extra Small to XXX-Large. Desktop defaults to Medium; mobile defaults to Extra Large — phones are easier to read with bigger text out of the box.

Why two settings: your phone runs the same app as your desktop, and it used to borrow whatever text size you'd set on the desktop. Now you can have, say, a comfortable large size on your desktop monitor and a tighter size on your phone — each remembers its own.

One-time note: because mobile has its own size (default Extra Large), the first time you open Omniscio on your phone after this update it shows Extra Large, even if your desktop was set to a different size. Set "Mobile text size" once and it sticks.

Where to find it

Settings → Appearance holds the Desktop text size and Mobile text size cards, which are the first two in that pane. Away from Settings, the desktop size is reachable from Ctrl+= / Ctrl+- and from Ctrl+scroll anywhere in the app, and on a phone the fastest route is the ▦ tools menu in the bottom bar, whose Text size row carries − / + buttons.

How it behaves

How to use it

1. Open Settings → Appearance.
2. Desktop text size and Mobile text size are the first two cards.
3. Pick a size on either. The UI resizes instantly — no reload.

You can set the mobile size from your desktop (to pre-configure your phone) or directly on the phone itself — Settings → Appearance works on both. On the desktop you can also just press Ctrl+= / Ctrl+- — the shortcut always steps whichever size matches the screen you're on.

Or hold Ctrl and scroll the mouse wheel — scroll up for larger, down for smaller. It does the exact same thing as Ctrl+= / Ctrl+- (one size step per notch), so if you're used to zooming a web page with Ctrl+scroll, it just works. (This replaces the browser engine's own blurry page-zoom, which wasn't saved and didn't match your Text size.) If you're scrolling over something that has its own Ctrl+scroll zoom — like an image preview or the screen-recorder editor — that keeps working; Text size only steps on the rest of the app.

On a phone, the quickest way is the header menu (no Settings trip needed): tap the ▦ tools menu in the bottom bar and use the Text size row's − / + buttons. It steps the Mobile text size live, the menu stays open so you can keep tapping, and the buttons grey out at the smallest / largest size.

For agents

How it works

Both sizes are settings on AppSettings — fontSize (desktop) and mobileFontSize (mobile), each one of the seven FONT_SIZES tokens (fontSize defaults to medium, mobileFontSize to extra-large), defined in /src/shared/font-size.ts and added to the Appearance Zod schema (mirroring the existing fontSize).

The app picks which one is "live" through a single helper, resolveFontSize(fontSize, mobileFontSize, isMobile) — on the mobile layout (narrow + touch) it returns mobileFontSize, otherwise fontSize. The renderer reads it through the useEffectiveFontSize() hook, which drives the data-font-size attribute on <html> (the root --app-font-size, so every rem-based element scales) and every place that measures against the font size (the virtualized session lists, the KMS tags panel, the mind map). Using the one helper everywhere is what keeps the rendered text and the layout math in step on a phone — a list that measured the desktop size while rendering the mobile size would overlap its rows.

Pop-out and other secondary windows (a project or integration opened in its own window, the KMS window, Quick Launch, Scratchpad, …) each run their own minimal copy of the app, so they adopt your desktop text size through the one shared window bootstrap (applyWindowTheme in /src/renderer/src/lib/window-theme-bootstrap.ts) — applied when the window opens and re-applied live when you change the size, the same way those windows adopt your theme. They keep the desktop size (a phone can't open a second window), and because it rides the shared bootstrap, a new window can't silently forget it.

The phone receives its size in the initial WEB_BOOTSTRAP payload (so it paints at the right size immediately), and any change you make on desktop reaches an open phone live over the settings-changed push.

On the desktop main window, Ctrl+MouseWheel steps the same Text size. A small hook (useFontSizeWheelZoom) watches for Ctrl+scroll, suppresses the browser engine's native page zoom, and calls the same stepper the keyboard uses (stepLiveFontSize) — so the two can never drift. A little accumulator makes one wheel notch equal one size step (and stops a trackpad or Mac pinch-zoom, which the browser delivers as a burst of Ctrl+scroll events, from blowing through every size at once), and it stands aside when you're scrolling over a surface that already has its own Ctrl+scroll zoom (an image preview, the screen-recorder editor).

On mobile the ▦ header menu also carries a Text size A−/A+ stepper (the no-keyboard equivalent of Ctrl+= / Ctrl+-): it writes mobileFontSize through the same stepFontSize helper, and because the settings write is optimistic the whole UI rescales the instant you tap.

The behavior and its invariants are locked by the contracts at /.claude/memory/contracts/mobile-font-size-contract.md and /.claude/memory/contracts/mobile-header-menu-contract.md (the header-menu Text size stepper, text-size-stepper-stays-open), and tests tests/unit/shared/font-size.test.ts, tests/unit/hooks/useEffectiveFontSize.test.tsx, tests/unit/hooks/useKeyboardShortcuts-mobile-fontSize.test.ts, and tests/unit/components/MobileHeaderMenu.test.tsx.

Related

• per-window-zoom.md — Text size is app-wide and changes text everywhere; per-window zoom is per pop-out window and scales everything (text, icons, images) on that one window via CSS zoom, using the same 75%–150% ladder.
• chat-depth.md — another Appearance dial (how three-dimensional the chat looks), in the same pane
• keyboard-shortcuts.md — Ctrl+= / Ctrl+- and the full shortcut list