MacVim: Thicker font rendering compared to TextMate
macos, macvim, rendering, textmate
Solution
This has to do with subpixel antialiasing. Textmate disables this for themes with dark backgrounds: https://github.com/textmate/textmate/wiki/Hidden-Settings#controlling-font-smoothing
for MacVim subpixel antialiasing can be disabled with the terminal command:
defaults write org.vim.MacVim AppleFontSmoothing -int 0
Problem
This is bothering me for some time now. With same source file, same theme (almost) the thickness of text between MacVim and Textmate is different. I have linked to the screenshot .. here. There are 3 editors in it. Leftmost is sublime v3, middle is MacVim and rightmost is TextMate. The objective is to compare the font thickness. MacVim & sublime text is much thicker whereas TextMate is slicker (and sophisticated .. personal choice :) ). All this is on Mac OS X Mavericks with retina display. I hope u all see the differences in the screenshot. Note: for MacVim, toggling the anti-alias option does make some difference but still nothing compared to TextMate. Questions: - Is there any configuration in VIM (or Mac OS) which governs the font thickness? I am a primarily Vim user, so interested in solutions for VIM - (Out of curiosity) Why is the rendering different? I would assume that all the editors must be relying on underlying OS APIs