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Comment by askonomm | Hacker News Reader

1440p monitor would probably be why the text is blurry - there simply isn't enough pixels to make things smooth without resorting to special hacks to improve LowDPI text rendering, which with more and more displays being HiDPI many don't bother doing.

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I am amazed people consider 1440p low resolution. My knee-jerk reaction was to assume you were sarcastic. I use a monitor of roughly that many lines of pixels and have never had observed blurry text in the tools I use (and I use fairly small fonts).

Are you using enlarged text or native 1440p? If the latter, have you used 4k or retina displays in the past? It’s hard to go back after that.

Look, you can insist that a 1440p monitor can only show blurry text all you like, but the problem that people are talking about is that the text is even blurrier than that.

I didn't insist that. Understood, but specifically, I was talking to the comment I replied to, which was about 1440p monitors in particular.

Ah, yeah. You aren't the person they replied to.

I have native 1440p 120Hz on my main screen which is more than 30inches across (ultrawide). I can see pixels if I look close enough, but I do not see any pixels at usual reading distance.

I have used retina displays of various sizes -- but after a while I just set them down to half their resolution usually (i.e. I do not use the 200% scaling from the OS, rather set them to be 1440p (or lower on 13inch laptops)). I have not seen an advantage to retina displays.

Text on 1440p looks great with full hinting and subpixel rendering. Unfortunately, macOS does neither, so the jump to retina feels more significant than it is.

Native 1440p, never used retina nor 4k.

(not parent commenter, but hold same opinion)

Same here... 1440p 32" is optimal for me, the only improvement I'd consider right now is 1600p equivalent.

Biggest draw for me with 1440p 32" is being the same DPI as a 1080p 24". I like to have one big monitor and then 2 small flank vertical monitors and having them all be the same DPI just makes headaches go away on every operating system I use them with.

Damn. I am so happy with my old 17" monitor and 1280x1024 resolution here. :D

How big is your screen? At 27", I can clearly see pixels on 1440p. A 4k display with 150% scaling (effectively 1440p) looks much better. Maybe you haven't used a higher resolution? If so, you might not know what you're missing.

Not GP. But I have a 24" 4k (close to retina), the MBA screen and while they're nicer than the 27" 1440p I have, the latter is essentially worthless on macOS. With Linux, it's more than fine. Not super sharp, but quite readable. On macOS, the blurred text is headache inducing.

(cross-posting on both subthreads): I have native 1440p 120Hz on my main screen which is more than 30inches across (ultrawide). I can see pixels if I look close enough, but I do not see any pixels at usual reading distance.

I mean the last time I saw anyone have a 1440p display was back in the early 2010's, so ... nowadays most people that I know buy 4k 27"/32" displays at minimum, with 5k displays gaining popularity as the price for them goes down. Macbooks for example come with a very high resolution display, and so do most high-end PC laptops, too.

Yes yes, all your friends are rich, good for you.

4k displays are available at just a few hundred bucks these days, I'd hardly call that being rich.

That was absolutely not true in the "early 2010s", not even 5 years ago unless you wanted to seriously compromise on some other aspect of the display.

I did not say people used 4k displays in early 2010s en masse, I said that's when I last saw people use 1440p displays. I live in present time, and in present time 4k displays are very cheap. It gets a little more pricey if you want high refresh rate as well, though my 4k 144hz display was just around 400 EUR, which I would consider a lower-mid-tier price range.

You are misremembering things. Macbooks in early 2010 had only 800 rows of pixels: https://support.apple.com/en-us/111958

Great sample size

> many don't bother doing.

Apparently all editors bothered doing, except Zed.

From the Issue:

> Zed looks great on my MacBook screen, but looks bad when I dock to my 1080p monitor. No other editor has that problem for some reason.

1440p is high enough for anything depending on screen size.

If they're running everything on the GPU then their SDF text rendering needs more work to be resolution independent. I'm assuming they use SDFs, or some variant of that.

Really, the screen isn't the issue given that on other editors OP says it is fine.

Knuth would be angry reading this :)

Literally every other editor and application besides Zed seem to be working just fine.

Lol so many people use 1440p, 1660p, even 1080p or 720p and have perfectly crisp text across many programs. If Zed can't figure it out that's on them.

I remember coding on 640x480 monitor long ago and having no issues with text rendering

I've never owned anything beyond 1080p. I've never had issues reading text on them, although the graphical quality could be better.

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