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Comment by julik | Hacker News Reader

I would have switched in a pinch if Zed had their low-DPI font rendering in order. At the moment it just looks bad.

This is interesting to me, because I see this kind of comment on almost every Zed post.

I haven't used a low-DPI monitor for like... not sure, but more than a decade, I'm pretty sure, so for me the weird blocker I have with Zed is the "OMG YOU HAVE NO GPU!!!! THIS WILL NOT END WELL!" warning (I run a lot of Incus containers via RDP, and they mostly have no GPU available).

But what kind of monitors are you low-DPI people using? Some kind of classic Sony Trinitron CRTs, or what? I'm actually curious. Or is it not the display itself, but some kind of OS thing?

Depending on the definition I'm not a low DPI user myself, but in my friend group, I seem to be the only person who cares about >160 dpi, lots of people are using 1440p displays, or >34" 4k displays. In Apple's mind, high dpi (eg retina) is > 218 dpi, so my lowly 34" 5120x2160 doesn't count for them. But it is > 160 which is my personal threshold for hi dpi.

There aren't all that many >20" displays on the market that meet Apple's definition of high dpi, and not a ton more that meet my much looser definition.

I was imagining 72dpi like old CRT monitors, but yeah, I'd agree that 160 feels like a fair threshold.

I have a 4-5 year old ultra wide monitor which is a lot of pixels but low dpi. I really like the single monitor containing two screens worth of pixels, but I wish it was high dpi. At the time there weren’t really high dpi ultra wides available, and they’re still expensive enough that upgrading isn’t a high priority for me… but I’m sure I will at some point.

Regular HD LCD monitors are typical office fare.

I actually don't understand what I'm missing. I'm using two old monitors, a 27" at 2560x1440 and a 23.5" at 1920x1080 (in addition to my high DPI Framework 13 screen). How else can I get at least 4480 across (after scaling to a font size I can read - I'm 49) and still cover that many inches? My DPI right now is about 100, so to double that, wouldn't I need 8960 across 44 inches? I don't really want to pay $1500 for resolution my eyes are probably too old to notice.

It’s okay eyes are just different. I personally enjoy 220DPI, but 60Hz looks absolutely fine. However at the workplace enough people complain about 60Hz that all the monitors at work are 120Hz. I don’t notice any additional smoothness at all so it’s all wasted on me.

Typical DPIs are still all over the place depending on the demographic. Macs have been ~200dpi forever, while cheap PCs are still mostly ~100dpi, and decent PC setups tend to land somewhere in the middle with ~150dpi displays which are pretty dense but not up to Mac Retina standards. Gamers also strongly favor that middle-ground because the ultra-dense Mac-style panels tend to be limited to 60hz.

Zed started out as a Mac-only app, and that's reflected in the way their font rendering works.

I guess that makes sense. I'm a 280ppi convert, so I judge Mac users with pity — Linux and Windows work perfectly with my 31.5" 8K display (from fuckin' 2017 btw...) but Macs can only drive it at 6K, which adds a fuzz factor.

Unless you use it at 4K, but macOS isn't really usable that way (everything way too small).

But yeah, it's 60Hz. Which has sucked ever since I accidentally got a 120Hz display, so now 60 Hz looks like 30Hz used to...

    Monitor                              Resolution       PPI
    ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
    31.5" 8K                             7680 × 4320      280
    27" 5K                               5120 × 2880      218
    31.5" 6K                             5760 × 3240      210
    23" 4K                               3840 × 2160      192
    27" 4K                               3840 × 2160      163
    34" 5K ultrawide                     5120 × 2160      163
    31.5" 4K                             3840 × 2160      140
    39.7" 5K ultrawide                   5120 × 2160      140
    44.5" 5K ultrawide (LG 45GX950A-B)   5120 × 2160      125

P.S.

I had a chance to try that LG 45GX950A-B at Yodobashi Camera in Akihbara the other day, and... that measly 125ppi might overperform at the distance you have to put it at. But then again my 50-year-old eyeballs are starting to be like "anyway you need your glasses bro" so... YMMV

There are actually 218ppi 180hz panels coming soon, although they will no doubt cost a kidney for the first few years.

https://rog.asus.com/monitors/27-to-31-5-inches/rog-strix-5k...

Looks good overall, but:

> USB-C with 15W power delivery for maximum compatibility

I am hoping that is a typo.

Yeah that's... not great if correct. LGs version has 90W PD.

https://tftcentral.co.uk/news/lg-27gm950b-5k-monitor-announc...

What does that mean? If the monitor only requires 15W to operate, that's a good thing, right? Unless monitors are expected to use less than that? I'm not familiar with reading monitor spec sheets.

That's output power. USB-C monitors can charge your laptop while it's connected through a single cable.

to add on to what jsheard said, for this feature to be usable (ie, charge your laptop just by plugging in the monitor), you need this number to be about what your laptop's charger is. At 15W, even a macbook air would run out of power slowly while plugged into this monitor, assuming you don't plug a second cable into your laptop. 65W or 90W is a much more normal value for a feature like this.

That all makes sense. The only thing I was missing was that this refers to power output. It seems like kind of a niche and tenuous value-add for a monitor. Why would I want to get power from my monitor?

> Why would I want to get power from my monitor?

Both at work and at home, I can plug in my monitor to my laptop with a single cable to my monitor. That single cable charges my laptop, connects the display, and passes through a usb hub that's built into the monitor that connects my keyboard and webcam. It's _incredibly_ convenient. It's also just a lot less cabling. You can think of it like a dock, built into the monitor for free.

> It seems like kind of a niche

Different workflows/circles. It's not something you're likely to use with a desktop, mainly with a laptop. It also really only works well if you use thunderbolt. It's reasonably common but probably not a majority where I work, where 90% of dev machines are macs.

Charging and video on the same cable is super cool. I take it all back.

Mine is 2560x1440 which is a pretty nice "sweet spot" size. A comparable 5k to 6k display still commands a substantial price, and - given that I work at two locations - would need me to have two of them. The screen I use as my current (a 3x2 BenQ) also has some amount of subsampling going on, because running it at 2x ("Retina native HiDPI") all the UI controls are too damn big, and space is not enough. Running it at 1x (everything teeeny-tiny) is just not very good for my eyesight and not very workable - and, again, with Zed bumps into the same broken antialiasing rasterizer they have.

And it is not an OS thing. The OS renders subpixel antialiased fonts just fine. But Zed uses its own font rasterizer, and it completely falters when faced with a "standard passable resolution" screen - the letters become mushy, as if they have been blurred - and rather sloppily at that.

It depends on your OS.

Linux and Windows are significantly better for both 1440p and 4k monitors. Both Linux and Windows have subpixel rendering and configurable font hinting for 1440p. And they both have fractional scaling UIs for 4k. macOS on the other hand only really looks acceptable on a 5k monitor.

When people says things like "mine is 2560x1440" on HN, are they talking about the mac scaled resolution? I feel like some context is always missing from resolution discussions, and it's a topic non-technical people can weigh in on as well.

The 2560x1440 is QHD which is kind of a happy medium: high resolution enough to look really sharp, but not so high resolution that you have to scale it up like Macs do on retina displays. Having had retina Macs (and been very happy with them) since they came out, I've been using 16" and 17" QHD panels on my linux laptops for about five years... and they are actually just fine.

My 42.5" 4k LG monitor is 104 DPI being Low by macOS conventions.

> But what kind of monitors are you low-DPI people using?

They’re still pretty common in enterprise. So cheap. At this point most desks probably cost more than the PCs on top of them.

TBF, enterprise probably still has to deal with ancient apps that can’t handle higher resolution well.

I used to have the same complaint, and recently swapped to 4k monitors. I thought that would solve my zed font problems, but text presentation is still bad. In zed, it feels like there is significantly more spacing between each line compared to vscode (or any other text editor).

Is it on linux?

Yes. And Windows.

https://zed.dev/docs/linux

Mind explaining how / why you have a low DPI monitor? I haven't even seen one in maybe a decade.

Many people call 1080p/24" "low DPI" these days. Though no idea what OP actually has.

Define low dpi. Apple's definition has been >218dpi, which is much higher than 4k@27", which is about the smallest 4k monitor one can buy (exluding 15" portable monitors)

1080p is the most popular screen resolution by far, and on regular monitors 1080p is "low DPI".

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

It blows my mind that the most ubiquitous computer screen resolution worldwide is considered too niche for decent support by the Zed project. Hopefully that will change in 2026?

The gamer market while overlapping with the developer market, is not a perfect circle. And where the circle does overlap, devs often work on a different display than they game on.

Perhaps reserve your mind being blown for situations where the GP hasn’t confused pixel count and pixel density.

Zed “supports” 1080p monitors just fine. Supports is in quotes because it doesn’t need to do anything nor care at all about the count of pixels on the screen.

If you can call the left image [1] "supporting 1080p" I guess Zed supports it. But it looks like VS Code and other editors somehow support it better without getting blurry.

Keep in mind that Zed developers [2] consider blurry fonts on low DPI displays a Priority 1 issue, and a reproducible bug that is commonly encountered.

I'm sure if there was no blurry font issue with Zed, they would just close this bug report.

[1]: https://ibb.co/zVS0Qz6z

[2]: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7992

Low DPI fonts and 1080p resolution are orthogonal concerns. Pixel count and pixel density are not the same thing.

I do not doubt some people experience some issues, but I have regularly used zed with 1080p and 1440p 24" monitors (on macos) and I never experienced any font rendering problem. Saying "zed does not render fonts at low dpi monitors well" is a bit of an exaggeration.

"1080p is the most popular screen resolution by far" for people who use Steam and therefore may be optimising for framerate or connecting to a TV, and even that's pretty meaningless without knowing the physical dimensions of the screen. 1080p is a screen resolution, DPI is screen density - 1080p on a phone is pretty high DPI.

1080p is neither high nor low DPI (dots per inch). DPI requires knowing the physical size of a screen, not simply the number of pixels.

Try finding a new 1080p screen small enough to count as high DPI; there aren't many! Using 218ppi from elsewhere in the thread as the threshold, you'd need a 10 inch 1920×1080 screen to achieve it, so a 1080p computer screen is almost certainly low DPI.

Perhaps you have a 49'' screen

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