It’s a little bit confusing changing the font size of IDE controls and menus. The options dialog has only font size changes for the editor, not for the whole IDE. This is specially helpful on windows with scaled screen resolution on HiDPI displays.
The trick is to add an additional parameter to the VM options in the netbeans.conf configuration file. On Windows this is e.g. C:\Program Files\NetBeans 8.2\etc\netbeans.conf, on OS X /Applications/NetBeans/Netbeans 8.2.app/Contents/Resources/etc.
Add the parameter --font-size to the line starting with netbeans_default_options.
Example:
netbeans_default_options="--font-size=14 -J-client -J-Xss2m -J-Xms32m"
Now the IDE has a font size of 14pt for the IDE.
In my version of netbeans 82. it’s:
`fontsize`
Rather than:
`font-size`
(Notice the removal of the hyphen)
Not sure if that’s because I’m running linux or not, but thought I’d expand on this for others who run into the same challenge I did.