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-Dswing.aatext=true

-Dawt.useSystemAAFontSettings=lcd

-Dsun.java2d.xrender=true

It appears swing fonts actually are fixable, see for example this approach using patched JDK (on Linux). (Fixing issue for Idea on Linux, but actually fixes it for all Swing apps - http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-57233 )

Thank you! There's also a fix for Arch, no idea if it's the same patch, though. https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/jre7-openjdk-headless-fon...

I use NetBeans on my MBP retina and the fonts look just perfect.

Well NetBeans RCP is itself based on Swing.