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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

I tried Pharo awhile ago, but last I checked the HiDPI support was still not there, and the menu was just unusable on my QHD+ screen.

It's a bit of a common point of frustration for me, because I've had the same problem with Squeak, Dolphin, and several other flavors of Smalltalk that I've tried. Because of this, the only version of Smalltalk that I've actually been able to work on has been GNU Smalltalk in a terminal.

This is disappointing, because I really want to play with it more. Can anyone recommend a modern version of Smalltalk with a GUI that has HiDPI support?

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There is Bloc, which is a fully vector based engine that is resolution independent (actually there is Sparta under this which is a recast of Athens).

All tools can use it but are not part of the official Pharo6 release. This does not mean that Bloc doesn't work.

https://github.com/pharo-graphics/Bloc

On top of Bloc is Brick, with the widgets.

This project is meant to have Pharo support whatever surface and resolution one is throwing at it. There are commercial projects underway using it for tabletop style UIs.

http://www.slideshare.net/esug/bloc-a-graphical-user-interfa...

To try this out: https://github.com/pharo-graphics/Tutorials

So, all of Moz2D style stuff is working in Bloc

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/GFX/Moz2D

Perhaps it's a simple matter of nobody having raised this issue so far? I think this is their issue tracker:

https://pharo.fogbugz.com/

I said almost the same thing on reddit here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6fmzwn/pharo_6...

The upshot seems to be that they're working on it, slowly.

>I tried Pharo awhile ago, but last I checked the HiDPI support was still not there, and the menu was just unusable on my QHD+ screen.

If you don't mean actually unusable (e.g. artifacts, too tiny, etc) then it sounds like a really superficial issue...

That attitude is more-or-less why Smalltalk is in the boat it's in. Lots of mindshare with few actual users because everybody can name a superficial issue that keeps them from using it.

If only the Pharo community knew that, they would have jumped to fix this issue! Because clearly they have all the time and resources in the world, and they only keep this issue open out of spite...

It's a volunteer non profit project. If people haven't done, clearly the don't have the time to do it over other things.

Tsk, tsk-ing them for not having fixed everybodys and anybodys pet peeves is beyond meaningless.

It's not like random non-Pharo using programmers are entitled to anything. Or like anybody forces them to use the platform.

If they don't like it, it's rather "don't let the door hit you on your way out".

If, otoh, they want to use Pharo they can. If they find that future important, they can help build it.

I hope you feel better after that little outburst. If this is your reaction to mild criticism of obvious shortcomings, it puts out quite a welcome mat.

I'm not the "Pharo community", just someone trying out Pharo.

But I don't think entitled criticism helps or is welcome in any community project.

It's easy to point at anything and ask them why they haven't done it yet, and that it's this "mindset" that keeps them small.

As if if they had a different mindset they'd also have magical resources.

There were more pressing matters to solve. A lot of Pharo devs are using Macbook Pros with retina display, so they have an itch to scratch. But the issue lies on the VM side for now, so that limits the numbers of contributors + PharoVM reunited on the OpenSmalltalk initiative and that is no walk in the park.

Another easy way to solve that for one's HiDPI support would be to hack the VM a bit to display things properly.

I should do that for my Surface Pro 4. But that would be a specific build.

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