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Comment by sapiogram | Hacker News Reader

Thank you, I bring this up in every Zed thread on the internet, hopefully the devs will eventually fix it. Until they do, Zed is simply unusable on regular-DPI displays, at least in light mode. See these screenshots:

Example Zed screenshot, using "Ayu Light": https://i.ibb.co/Nr8SjvR/Screenshot-from-2024-07-28-13-11-10...

Same code in VS Code: https://i.ibb.co/YZfPXvZ/Screenshot-from-2024-07-28-13-13-41...

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I think it's a combination of using a Zed theme with insufficiently high text contrast, missing subpixel font rendering in Zed, and possibly more gamma correction and less stem darkening than you're used to.

Zed defaults to a font weight a little thin for my taste, increase it and it will probably solve your issue. I don’t see anything really wrong with the first screenshot, might just be a matter of what you are used to.

I'm wildly guessing here, but I remember that at some point in time macos had (and maybe has) this feature enabled by default which artificially makes pseudo-bold font out of regular font. That's why some websites have very thin and unreadable fonts, because they were tested only on macos. Maybe it's the same issue here? Looks kinda similar.

Setting on macos was called "use font smoothing when available".

It's the exact same on Linux.

Use the same font and increase the font weight.

I don't see the difference except that the font is thinner in the Zed screenshot. Try with same font weight and color scheme.

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