Magnification and General Font Size in SQL Developer

As a speaker at conferences, it is important that customers can see what I am demonstrating, no matter the size of the room, or how far back they sit. When I was working in the JDeveloper team, I used to change the font settings in JDeveloper so that the text would be clearly visible. For some time now, I have been using a Magnifying Glass instead of changing the font. Mostly becuase of the loss of real estate when making all the fonts much bigger. The magnifier I like is one I got from Source Forge - http://magnifier.sourceforge.net/

Using a magnifier is great for what I need, when speaking and doing demos, because I can show the audience just what I want them to see. It's no good if you need the font on your IDE to be a little bigger while you are working. Also real estate is typically less of problem when working at home or in the office, as most of us are not limited to the small screen of a laptop.

Changing the font size in SQL Developer is an enhancement that a few have asked for. In JDeveloper we just changed the setting in the ide.properties file. As we don't have the property in our ide.properties file, it didn't seem to be something we could control. While working on something quite different today, I came across the ide.properties file in SQL Developer again, and while the font property is not there, it occurred to me that by adding it, it might override the default. It does!

Increasing the Font Size in SQL Developer

• Locate the ide.properties file in your installation in the following folder:
  {your SQL Developer install directory}\sqldeveloper\sqldeveloper\system\oracle.sqldeveloper.1.2.0.2998
  - you'll see I am using SQL Developer 1.2
• Add the line Ide.FontSize=14 or what ever size suits you. The default for the IDE is 11
• Restart SQL Developer

The Code Editors are not affected by this. To update those, you need to change the settings once you have restarted SQL Developer. Select the menu Tools -> Preferences... Expand the Code Editor node and select Fonts to update those. This property affects the SQL Worksheet, along with the Execute script (F5 ) output, and the PL/SQL Editors. My initial review seems to show reasonable dialogs throughout, with the exception of some of the new Migration Workbench dialogs.

Have fun!