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Ohhhh, detached… I should have asked about that. In that case, I totally agree that it should be resizable so it can be made wider. That has also been a problem for a long time. I don’t know if that’s already been submitted as a feature request over in the Ideas section of this community, but if you don’t find it there it should be added. If a moderator sees this maybe they can convert the post to a feature request there?
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This behavior has existed for many years and hasn’t changed much. It isn’t only caused by changing the UI Font Size, any one of the following can cause it. But combining two or three of these conditions makes the problem more likely to happen:
- The width of the options bar becomes too narrow for the number of options that some tools have, such as when the application frame is resized to be narrower.
- The effective (UI) resolution of the screen is set below the Recommended screen width and height in the Photoshop System Requirements.
- UI scaling is increased.
In the demo below, I’ve constrained the Photoshop application frame to 972 pixels wide. (The Minimum system requirement is 1024 pixels wide.) The options bar is OK as long as the selected tool doesn’t have a lot of options. But notice as I move the pointer to the Tools panel and select different tools, some tools have so many options that at this narrow window width, the options on the left start colliding with the options on the right.
And later in the demo, even if there is originally enough space between the left and right options groups, when I make the window narrower you can see the options on the right collide with the options on the left.
Has Adobe done anything about this? Yes, a while back they added an option called Use Narrow Options Bar. You’ll find this in Preferences / Workspace. If you enable it, you get a version of the options bar that’s redesigned to take much less space. The main way they made the options bar narrower is by converting long text strings into much more compact icons. This is great because it does save a lot of width, but now you have to know what the icons mean so it’s less intuitive. If you decide that Use Narrow Options Bar is a good solution for you, remember that if you don’t recognize the icons that replace the former long text, hover the pointer over an icon until its descriptive tool tip appears.
This could likely be resolved if the Options Bar height could be manually resized, or if it dynamically adjusted based on font size.
By @mk998
It’s unclear how that would help, because if the point of choosing a larger UI size was to make the UI larger and more readable, any solution that makes things fit by downsizing the icons or text works against that by making them tinier. That might be why Adobe chose instead to replace text with icons, so that the readable taller icon and text sizes can be preserved while still fitting everything in.
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