For some bitmapped fonts, it really seems to really turn anti-aliasing on and off. Looking closely at the characters while switching back and forth, you can see that the anti-aliased font is pretty much pixel-for-pixel identical to the bitmapped one, only blurry.
Anti-aliasing in Mac OS X’s Terminal
Mac OS X simplified the font smoothing settings (anti-aliasing) for Mac OS and all apps running within it, but for some the change is unwelcome. If you feel like your screen looks different, or that fonts look a little unusual and text looks different too, it probably does, and the change can be very profound on certain LCD displays.
I have been using a MacBook Pro for about a year or so, and I can definitely say that I am really satisfied from it. But there is one little thing that annoys me about it: the fonts in many text editors I use (including Komodo Edit 8, Brackets, MacVim, Vim, Github's Atom, etc) are very blurry. I use my laptop mainly for programming, and I spend many hours in front of the screen, so this blurring becomes very annoying for my eyes. Recently I downloaded Virtual Box, through which I run Ubuntu 10.04. Below there is a comparison of the Ubuntu's terminal and my macbook's terminal:
This is font anti-aliasing. In Terminal.app go to Preferences..., Settings and select a profile or create your own that fits your needs. There you can disable anti-aliasing (except for the Basic profile). Select it and click Default on the bottom of the list.
Do you think fonts and screen text looks fuzzy, blurry, or excessively thin in macOS Mojave? If so, it may be due to changes in anti-aliasing in Mojave, particularly for users with non-retina displays. If you are running macOS Mojave on a Mac without a retina display, or with an external monitor that does not have an ultra-high resolution screen, you may have noticed that some fonts and text can appear as fuzzy, blurry, or excessively thin and difficult to read. Fortunately, with a little effort you can make some adjustments to how MacOS Mojave handles font smoothing and anti-aliasing which may improve the appearance of text and fonts on your Mac screen.
All of this may or may not apply to you and your particular Mac, screen, and display, but the cause (if this does apply to you) is apparently due to a change in how macOS Mojave handles font rendering and anti-aliasing.
Versions of macOS prior to 10.15 Catalina include a copy of GNU Emacs 22 without GUI support compiled in and thus Emacs is automatically available on all but the most recent versions of macOS via the terminal. On macOS 10.15 Catalina and higher, mg (previously known as microGNUemacs) is still included. However, there are other Emacs distributions geared towards macOS that include GUI support as well as other features that may make it a more appropriate choice for some, if not most people.
defaults read fgrep Smooth returns nothing, but manually setting AppleFontSmoothing -int 0 or AppleSmoothFixedFontsSizeThreshold -int 24, for NSGlobalDomain, as per -anti-aliasing-fonts-in-xcode-4-4-in-mountain-lion, doesn't seem to cause any effect, either.
Many users are having blurry text or fonts on Mac computers with external non-retina monitors. This blurriness seems to be due to changes in the anti-aliasing in these particular macOS versions. One example is having your Macbook Pro with retina display connected to an external display which may cause the text to be blurry on the latter.
The next step is a manual change, where you will try to change the strength of font smoothing settings or anti-aliasing in macOS. This procedure will also need to be performed via Terminal on your Mac computer. So we will once again head to the Applications/Utilities and open the Terminal.
The methods mentioned in this guide, might not apply to you directly or to a particular display or screen you have connected at a given point to your Mac computer with High Sierra or Mojave, but in most cases this is all you need to improve how these 2 operating systems handle font rendering and anti-aliasing.
It doesn't really matter whether I like it or not. As an admin, I need an OS that provides the option to leave anti-aliasing on or turn it off system-wide ? no exceptions...and do a great job at it. I like anti-aliasing. However, when an employee finds anti-aliased type "unworkable" because of eyestrain, it becomes a larger job performance/job satisfaction issue. Providing more comprehensive options in the area of text display that are better implemented would make migrating our entire organization to OS X an easier transition with less complaints.
Help! All you techno-geeks out there, please translate for me into layman's language how to fix the frickin' anti-aliasing thing. I cannot stand it. I never wanted OS X in the first place, only caved in b/c my PowerBook Lombard had died and I needed a replacement. I sorely, sorely miss OS 9.2, which I had organized to my liking and everything looked crisp. This OS X blurry font thing is a HUGE disappointment; really makes me mad. And it drives me nuts that 12 is the biggest option they give me to turn it off,l but I don't understand the above comments about changing it in Library or preferences or whatever...help! Which library? Which preferences? Where? Please specify. Thank you!!
What a relief to find this discussion and see that I am not alone! It has been severe headache and eyestrain central since I upgraded to OSX from 9.2 a month ago. I have used every utility (tinker tool) and terminal command I can lay my hands on to turn anti-aliasing off which works better in 10.3 than 10.4 but even the resulting non anti-aliased font is still hard to read. And you can't turn it off completely in safari or entourage unlike eudora or firefox.
Declare your terminal (i.e., set the terminal type variable, $TERM) as ansi, dtterm, rxvt, vt52, vt100, vt102, xterm, or xterm-color (the default); have the Delete key send a Control-H; escape non-ASCII input; paste newlines as carriage returns (on by default); enforce strict VT-100 keypad behavior; scroll to the bottom on input; toggle the audible and visual bells; and set the international character encoding.
You can also export your new setting as a .terminal file, which can be imported in another Leopard installation later. This is done as follows. In the Settings window, select the setting to be exported (e.g., Proto), then click on the gear icon (see Figure 1-4) at the bottom of the left part of the window and select Export to save the setting to a .terminal file, such as Proto.terminal. You can save the .terminal file to a convenient location, such as /Documents. Like .term files in older Mac OS X versions, a .terminal file is an XML property list (plist), which you can edit.
Terminator ( ) is a cross-platform, Java-based, freeware alternative to Terminal. Though it supports tabs, its feature set seems to come up short when compared to Terminal and iTerm. On the other hand, if having a cross-platform terminal emulator program is important to you, this one is worth a try.
Metal 3, the latest version of the software that powers the gaming experience across Apple platforms, introduces new features that take the gaming experience on Mac to new heights and unleash the full potential of Apple silicon for years to come. MetalFX Upscaling enables developers to quickly render complex scenes by using less compute-intensive frames, and then apply resolution scaling and temporal anti-aliasing. The result is accelerated performance that provides gamers with a more responsive feel and graphics that look stunning. Game developers also benefit from a new Fast Resource Loading API that minimizes wait time by providing a more direct path from storage to the GPU, so games can easily access high-quality textures and geometry needed to create expansive worlds for realistic and immersive gameplay.
The Problem I think what is happening is, that CLion has it's own anti-aliasing. Mixed with the anti-aliasing from OS X and CLion messes things up. The funny thing I experienced is, that in PyCharm for example that problem does not exist.
My troubles with Terminal began in Mac OS X 10.1. It shipped with a new Terminal application that took much longer to launch, and could not understand my existing terminal session files. Worse, when I converted the session files, the 10.1 Terminal insisted on starting a local shell before running the command saved in the session (e.g. an ssh connection to another host). The 10.1 Terminal bothered me enough that I pulled a copy of the old Terminal application off the Mac OS X 10.0 installation CD and proceeded to use that instead.
The Accessibility Zoom "Choose Display" setting gives you the option of showing the zoomed image on the external display while showing the un-zoomed image on the laptop. However, I do not recommend this because: it causes the display-invert option to invert only the un-zoomed version (although at least macOS 11+ has a "dark" theme under System Preferences / General, but not all applications make this work as well as display inversion),in macOS 12 it activates a 'bug' that causes image "smoothing" (i.e. blurring) to be turned on regardless of the value of its checkbox,it does not persist across a screen lock (so it encourages you to disable the lock, which might not be the best idea depending where you work), although settings are more likely to persist across logout or restart,it does not persist across a temporary loss of power to the external monitor,and it can cause a Mac kernel crash on resume from suspend, thus encouraging you to turn off energy saving, which has climate-change consequences.Instead, you can first set "Choose Display" to "all" (the default), then go to System Preferences / Displays (not to be confused with "Display" under Accessibility), Display Settings, and set "Use as" to "mirror", "optimise for" to internal (the drop-down might become mislabeled after this change), and resolution "scaled" for "larger text". You can then zoom and/or invert and see the resulting image on both displays.Using a "mirror" display has the side-effect of muting all notifications on macOS 12, unless a box is ticked to "allow notifications when mirroring or sharing the display" in System Preferences / Notifications. The location of this box is likely to be behind the Dock if you're using 'scaled for larger text', so you're not likely to notice it's there unless you hide the Dock (and there doesn't seem to be a keyboard shortcut)---too bad their interface designers had not invented some means of scrolling large dialogues.If you close the lid of the laptop, macOS reverts to zooming a single external display, and you typically have to re-do all the settings, and again when you re-open the lid. It's worse if you've used "Choose Display" and were zoomed in at the time the lid is opened---this can put the Mac's graphics subsystem in an inconsistent state (e.g. desktop vertically repeated) and you'll have to zoom out before it lets you change the settings back.Unfortunately I have not found a way to restore preferred zoom settings from a command-line script: it requires painful small-print mouse work every time.Therefore you should probably leave the laptop open at all times if you need to use its internal camera.Reducing anti-aliasing and smoothing "blur"It appears that the zoomed image is processed as follows:Text is anti-aliased onto a non-zoomed screen bufferThe pixels are then mapped onto the larger zoomed buffer (which degrades quality if the zoom factor is not an integer)An additional "smoothing" step is optionally applied to the newimage (I don't know if this step has knowledge of the original pixels, but itdoesn't seem to have any knowledge of the original fonts).The above steps acting in combination can blur the result.So my suggested settings are:Make your preferred zoom level an integer. That should at least stop the middle step from harming image quality.In the zoom options, try turning off "Smooth images",especially if your text has been antialiased to start with.Where possible, turn off antialiasing altogether:try typingdefaults write .GlobalPreferences AppleAntiAliasingThreshold 100 in a Terminal(it takes effect when you restart applications).In Terminal Preferences, try setting a font that has a bitmap version(e.g. Andale Mono rather than Menlo); Terminal should then let you turnoff its own "Antialias text" box so you can use the bitmaps.If Terminal or xterm sometimes crashes, you could try alternatives like iTerm:In iTerm 1 (more stable but does not support speaking selected text), set fonts and colours under View / Session info and disable session-initiated window resizing under Bookmarks / Manage profiles / TerminalIn iTerm 2 you have to edit the default profile in Profiles / Open Profiles to reach those settings, and don't tell it to report the terminal type as xterm-256color---if you do, any "screen" session you enter (perhaps on another host) may activate a bug that prevents command-line wrapping for the rest of the iTerm2 session---if you want to change the reported terminal type from xterm so your scripts know it's not Mac's X11, try xterm-color.Avoiding "getting lost" in panningIn the zoom options' screen movement section, I usually find the option called "So the pointer is at or near the center of the image" works better than the other two, unless you are working with tooltips, in which case set the mouse "tracking speed" (acceleration) fast so you can use the "when the pointer reaches an edge" setting for more control. Ideally it would be possible to reduce the desktop's overall height and width to about 1.6 to 1.8 times that of the magnified area, to reduce the chances of "getting lost". This is possible on non-Mac systems with old-style X11 setups but does not seem to be available on the Mac without reducing the magnification factor to a non-integer.If you do have to reduce the magnification factor to less than 2 and the resulting text is too small, then you might be able to make up the size by also using a lower-resolution display mode. In 10.x modes can be set under System Preferences / Display; in 11.x use System Preferences / Displays / Scaled / Larger text.(Some third-party applications are not tested with this setting and might display windows larger than the screen.)Speak selected textOn OS X 10.5+ you can enable a keyboard shortcut to speak selected text (defaults to Alt-Escape; press a second time to stop). This needs to be switched on in the text-to-speech preferences(in 11.x it's Accessibility / Spoken Content / Speak selection).In 10.8, you need to take two additional steps to work around a bug: (1) change the keyboard shortcut (if you like the default, change it back again), (2) press "Play" to hear the voice's demo. The shortcut key will then work. (These additional steps were not needed in 10.5 through 10.7.)The shortcut works in most Mac applications, including Terminal, but not iTerm 1 or (some versions of?) Chrome.It works in iTerm 2 at least from the 2012-12-24 release (not the stable 2011 v1.0.0 edition---that version reads the entire window instead of the selected text). However I recommend using at least the 2013-01-22 release which also fixes some crashes.Chrome should still work via "Speech" / "Start speaking" from the context menu, but Alt-Escape might not work as it does in Safari.If Safari is slow, try regularly removing its cache files from Library/Caches/Safari or Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari (using the Terminal or a script, not from Safari's menus)---it seems some versions of Safari mistakenly let these files accumulate enough to slow it downHere is a script to change the voice from the command line (useful if you work in several languages). 2ff7e9595c
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