Topic by Daniel W

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  • Daniel W
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Topic: Hide menu bar (or force custom GUI scaling).

One minor issue I have is that [the client area of] the main GUI window in any standalone Windows or Linux version of Organteq (I'm on 2.1.2 right now) has a 16:9 ratio *excluding* the menu bar. Including the menu bar, it is thus a tad taller than 16:9, so when I put Organteq in full screen mode on a 16:9 computer monitor, it doesn't quite fit nicely. On a FHD (1920x1080) screen, the GUI scales to something like 193% and leaves little black vertical bars on the sides, which looks just a little bit ugly.

Thus far, on KDE plasma in Debian 12, I've been able to work around that by manually selecting 200% interface magnification and moving the window so the menu bar gets pushed off screen. That left a 1920x1080 main window, filling the entire screen, with no visible menu bar. Since virtually everything in the Organteq menu bar can be accessed by other means as well, I found this to work well for me, while looking very clean.

However, now I have upgraded my studio computer monitor, from a 24" FHD touch LCD to a 32" 4K (3840x2160) touch LCD. Full screen now scales to 387%, with similar vertical black bars on the sides as before. To make the GUI to cover the entire width of the screen now, I'd either need an interface magnification of 400%, which isn't available (250% is max), or somehow be able to hide the menu bar, either always or just in full screen mode.

Both GTK and QT supports custom scaling of individual apps, but Organteq might have its own custom (perhaps cross-platform) GUI library, because neither the GDK_DPI_SCALE or QT_SCALE_FACTOR environment variables seems to have any effect on Organteq (or maybe I'm doing something wrong).

I would like to know, is there any, perhaps undocumented, way to either hide the menu bar or force a non-standard interface magnification? I am thinking of keyboard shortcuts, config file settings, environment variables, command line arguments or similar.

If nothing such currently exists, I'd like to propose a new setting in Options > General > User interface, to hide menu bar, or maybe just hide it in full screen mode. As the Options dialogue always has a button in the main GUI window, there should be no risk that someone hides the menu bar and then gets stuck, unable to enable it again.

I do realize that only Organteq developers can reasonably answer this. I am still putting this question in the forum, hoping that answers posted here, if any, might benefit others than just myself. Should this attempt yield nothing, I'll probably e-mail support (and likely post their reply here).

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Reply by tmyoung

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Re: Hide menu bar (or force custom GUI scaling).

I'm not sure what to recommend.  Can you load OTQ in a Linux DAW and use the DAW's application settings to set scaling?  I think part of the reason that OTQ/PTQ don't support free window scaling is how VSTs and similar plug-in standards control UI management within the host DAW.  I suspect--though I can't say for certain--that OTQ standalone is simply a VST or VST-like plugin instance running within a functionally headless DAW.  Therefore, if you hosted it inside something other than the headless DAW, you might have more UI control/options.  Hardly and other VSTs come to mind that support freely scaling the window.  I think a custom option is definitely an idea, but I don't know if there are technical constraints that such a feature comes crossways of (like DAWs only supporting max 250% scaling in the VST or AU standards--something again that I just don't know).

I can report that on Windows, I face the same problem; however, my global setting my OS display scaling at 200% means that I could get the 400% in question working as OTQ is only running at 100%.  Why OS-level scaling or application-level scaling (through the OS) is not responding seems to be a bug/issue with the OS or OTQ's implementation within the Linux ecosystem, as it seems to work as intended on Windows.  Whether that's something the devs could change or fix or actually an issue with GTK/QT is something I wouldn't begin to know the answer to.

I plan to do more with OTQ on Linux in the future as Win10 goes bye-bye, but I haven't gotten around to that yet.  Hopefully someone with more Linux insight for OTQ has a better option or idea than I can give.

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Reply by Daniel W

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Re: Hide menu bar (or force custom GUI scaling).

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. My "goal" here is to run OTQ actually full screen. If I load OTQ as a Reaper plugin, the OTQ window ends up embedded inside a Reaper plugin window. Hypothetically, if I could size and locate the OTQ part of that window just right, I could perhaps push the Reaper part of the window off screen on all sides. However, if I make the Reaper plugin window larger, the OTQ part just stays whatever size its currently set interface magnification dictates. Inside Reaper, the OTQ full screen option is gone, so, as far as I can tell, I seem to get less, not more, control over the OTQ window size, when loaded inside a "normal" DAW.

In Windows (11, in my case), I can indeed set both the OS and OTQ scaling to 200% each and effectively get 400%, but on Windows I can't push the OTQ standalone menu bar off screen (also, though I write Windows software for a living, I am moving my personal computing to Linux).

As far as my limited Linux knowledge permits, I can't see that OTQ depends on QT or GTK packages. Perhaps Modartt has their own low level GUI lib? I wish you good luck with your own Linux endeavors. The sooner you get going, the better, I think.

If was really eager, I might try to run the Windows OTQ version in Wine on Linux and fiddle with the DPI settings there. I worry that might be sub optimal in other ways though, so for now I think I'll try my luck with the support. Perhaps that hypothesized "headless DAW" has some settings or something? We'll see, I hope.

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Reply by tmyoung

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Re: Hide menu bar (or force custom GUI scaling).

Yeah, I'm really lucky having gotten enough Win11 for my needs--now I need to start converting the perfectly functional old boxes from Win10 to something that can stay online.

One thing that might help the discussion, are you in a Gnome or KDE environment?  Or along the same lines which flavor of Linux are you using?

My guess is that it's OS-level (though it'd be interesting to know if it's an issue on Mac or not), but I don't know if this is flavor-specific/SDK-specific or "global" to Linux.  I usually run Ubuntu, but I've yet to start bothering with something as technical as music production in Linux land.  I've used headless and GUI Debian-based systems for roughly 20 years, but it's always been dev/hosting/networking not productivity.

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/2xHiPcCsm29R12HX4eXd4J
Pianoteq Studio & Organteq
Casio GP300 & Custom organ console

tmyoung's Website

Reply by Daniel W

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Re: Hide menu bar (or force custom GUI scaling).

Original post 2025-JUL-20: I am on Debian 12, using the KDE Plasma 5 Desktop Environment and the Wayland compositor.

Today I found this: System Settings > Display and Monitor > Legacy Applications (X11):
(o) Apply scaling themselves
(  ) Scaled by the system

After changing that to
(o) Scaled by the system
OTQ standalone now follows the OS scaling. By setting OS scaling to 160% and interface magnification in OTQ to 250%, I can end up on an effective scaling of 400% in OTQ, which makes the "client area" of the main window fill the screen exactly. By using the window menu (Alt+F3) > More Actions > Move, I can push the title bar and the menu bar off screen, leaving me with 100% Organteq.

I may not want my entire OS locked to 160% in particular (145% would better match the DPI of my new screen), but it's a working solution for now, and maybe Wayland has some per-app custom scaling for legacy applications somewhere. I'll keep fiddling.


Edit 2025-JUL-21: Today I experimented a bit with an X11 session, and noted a few differences.

In an X11 session, OTQ does not follow the OS scaling, and the System Settings GUI scaling step size is 6.25% (16 steps per 100%), so even if I could make OTQ2 follow the X11 OS scaling, setting 160% in the System Settings GUI would not be trivial. In a Wayland session, OTQ does follow the OS scaling, when "Legacy Applications (X11): (o) Scaled by the system" is set and the the System Settings GUI scaling step size is 5% (20 steps per 100%), so setting 160% is trivial. However, as the "Scaled by the system" is, well, system wide, it also affects other X11 programs, such as Wine, which, in my experience, is better off managing its own scaling.

I also tried starting OTQ from the console, with the --help option, to see the available options. The options for running OTQ headless and rendering midi files as audio might be handy some other day. For now, the only mildly interesting option was --fullscreen, to start the standalone version full screen. I was hoping this might hide the menu bar, but it did not. That command line options, at all, exits, gives me hope that it would be easy enough for Modartt to implement a hypothetical --no-menu-bar option, if asked nicely. Would that exist, then --fullscreen would probably do exactly what I want, regardless of any OS scaling. That would be neat.

Last edited by Daniel W (Today 10:51)
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