by H.G.Muller » 31 Dec 2014, 14:16
This is an unwanted effect of the switch to the GTK widget set, which we haven't figured out yet how to avoid: the clocks refuse to shrink below their initial width. There is an easy work-around, though, which is to make sure the clocks are small enough at startup. This can be done with the aid of the command-line argument -size. E.g.
xboard -size 33
The possibility to size XBoard by dragging the window edges is relatively new anyway; before the switch from pixmaps to SVG graphics using the -size argument was the only way to affect the size. Even in the Xaw version (which does allow shrinking of the clocks) the current interactive sizing is not really as it should be (e.g. as it is in WinBoard), because it only affects the board, and not the fonts to go with it.
As the -size option is remembered in the settings file, you only have to do set it once to a satisfactory value.