Increase Wireshark Font Size on Mac OS X

Submitted by Hannes Schmidt on Sun, 12/07/2008 - 18:58.

Wireshark has a preference setting for the font of the capture display but it won't let you change the main font used for other UI elements such as like menu, toolbar and dialog windows. The default for the main font is illegibly small on my Mac OS X Leopard system -- I used Macports to install Wireshark and its dependencies. To fix it you need to add the gtk-font-name setting to your .gtkrc-2.0 preference file:

echo 'gtk-font-name = "Sans 14"' >> ~/.gtkrc-2.0

This will affect all applications using the GTK 2.0 toolkit but I guess that's ok.

( categories: Mac OS X | Administrator | Geek )
Submitted by Anonymous on Tue, 03/10/2009 - 08:56.
You can edit the files "gtkrc" and "pre_gtkrc" in "/Applications/Wireshark.app/Contents/Resources/themes/Clearlooks-Quicksilver-OSX/gtk-2.0/" to change the font attributes. Look for the entry "gtk-font-name" near the bottom.
Submitted by Anonymous on Tue, 12/30/2008 - 10:15.
Thanks for this tip Hannes, I was wondering how to do that (and other things). For example, when I mouseover some of the gtk controls, their text display becomes corrupted until I unmouseover (sometimes longer). I assume there's some standard tool Linux folks use to modify their gtk settings, but I don't know what it's called or whether there's a port of it in MacPorts. Any ideas? -Jared