Increase Sidebar Font-size Sublime Text 3

Question

I've been trying to increase the size of my SBT 3 sidebar font-size.

I've tried follow everything on this post here : Sublime Text 3 how to change the font size of the file sidebar?

I've tried

Try #1

"dpi_scale": 1.10 

Try #2

[
    {
        "class": "sidebar_label",
        "color": [0, 0, 0],
        "font.bold": false,
        "font.size": 12
    },
]

I kept getting

How would one go about and debug this further?

Answer 1

1. Navigate to Sublime Text -> Preferences -> Browse Packages will open folder
2. See Packages Folder then Open User Folder
3. Now check your current theme at your settings. i use this theme "theme": "Material-Theme-Darker.sublime-theme",
4. If you do not have theme file yet. create one

[
    {
        "class": "sidebar_label",
        "font.face": "Gotham",
        "font.size": 12
    }
]

Answer 2

The #1 option above for changing the dpi_scale may be problematic for you. dpi_scale is only supported on Linux; if you're not on that platform you should use ui_scale (which works everywhere, including Linux). However, these both change the scale of everything, not just the side bar, so this may not have the effect that you want. You also need to restart Sublime when you make changes to those particular setting for it to take effect.

As such, your #2 option above is generally the better way to go about this. The information is correct, but it needs to be specified as a part of your Theme, not in your user preferences; that's why adding it there is breaking things.

You want to examine your user preferences for the value of the theme setting; if you haven't explicitly set one, use the value from the default settings on the left of the window instead. For this example, here's what my theme is set to:

    "theme": "Adaptive.sublime-theme",

To activate the changes above, you want to create a file with the same name as your current theme and place it in your User package (use Preferences > Browse Packages... if you're not sure where that is). So in this case, I would create a file named Adaptive.sublime-theme.

Once you save the file, it will immediately take effect, so you should know if you did it correctly or not (the main point is that the file needs to have the correct name and extension). When Sublime loads your theme, it loads all files by that name from every package and combines them together, so this will augment your existing theme and update only the rules that you want, leaving everything else as it was.

Also note that as outlined above, this will disable bolding in your side bar and also make the text black; presumably that's what you intended to do, but if not, the only parts you need are the class to specify what the rule is changing and the font.size.