Grid & icon sizing

v0.9.7

Set your own rows and columns for the home screen and the drawer, scale icon size from 70% to 150%, and place icons and widgets on half-cell offsets for finer positioning.

Where

Settings → Home screen → Grid shape
Settings → Home screen → Icon size
Settings → Drawer → Grid shape

Choosing a grid shape

Settings → Home screen → Grid shape lets you pick the number of rows and columns for the home screen, from 2 to 10 each. The app drawer has its own, completely independent grid shape under Settings → Drawer → Grid shape — changing one never changes the other.

Under the hood

Both grids start seeded from your device’s own factory preset, so a fresh install looks exactly like it always has until you actually open one of these settings and change it.

Scaling icon size

The Icon size slider in Settings → Home screen scales home screen icons from 70% to 150%, in 5% steps. Hotseat icons and the icons inside folders scale along with it. The app drawer’s icon size is fixed and has no slider of its own, so it isn’t affected by this — with one exception: on a grid packed tight enough that the larger home screen icons no longer fit, the drawer’s icons can shrink as a side effect, even though nothing that controls the drawer directly was touched.

Under the hood

This happens because a single fit calculation covers both grids: when the home screen no longer fits at its chosen icon size, the whole layout is scaled back down, and the drawer inherits that same scale-down. Measured on a Pixel 7 Pro at a 7×5 grid, pushing the slider to 150% grew home screen icons to their full size but shrank the drawer’s icons from 56dp down to about 45dp; the same 150% on a roomier 4×4 grid left the drawer untouched. Below 100%, the drawer is never affected, since its own icon size already sits at a floor no scale-down would cross.

Half-cell placement

A checkbox on the Grid shape dialog — “Allow half-cell offsets,” off by default — lets you position home screen icons and widgets at halfway points between grid cells, in addition to the usual snap points. This adds placement freedom, not density: a 5×5 grid still holds 25 full-size icons either way. The dock and the icons inside a folder are excluded — they always stay on the whole-cell grid.

Dragging an icon that already sits on a half-cell offset still pushes any neighbor a full cell out of the way, never half a cell. Widgets can be positioned on a half-cell offset the same way, but resizing a widget always moves its edges in whole-cell steps.

If you turn the setting back off while icons are sitting on half-cell offsets, a confirmation dialog warns that those icons will round to the nearest whole cell, with a Cancel option. If rounding would put two icons on the same cell, the extra one spills onto a new page rather than being deleted. A half-cell layout survives a backup and restore, and restoring onto a device with a different grid shape re-places every icon into the new shape without deleting any.

Under the hood

Turning the setting on doubles the resolution of the underlying placement grid without changing what the rows/columns setting means — a 5×5 grid stays a 5×5 grid for sizing purposes, which is what keeps icons at their normal size. An odd placement coordinate on that doubled grid is what a half-cell offset actually is:

placement_columns = user_columns × 2   if half_cell_enabled else user_columns
placement_rows    = user_rows × 2      if half_cell_enabled else user_rows
span              = 2                  if half_cell_enabled else 1

is_half_cell_offset = placement_x is odd or placement_y is odd

Rounding on turn-off uses banker’s rounding (a half-way case rounds to the nearest even cell), and the layout is stamped with which grid it was saved in, so a restore can tell a half-cell layout from a whole-cell one instead of guessing.

Limits

One icon size percentage applies across all four orientation variants; icon labels don’t scale with the icon. The app drawer has no icon size setting of its own; the only thing that changes its icon size is the side effect described above.