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That's exactly the reason I don't use Jetbrains' products (font rendering looks like crap in them on Linux) and stick with Eclipse. I installed the non-official patched JVM to get the font rendering to look good but I'm not going to depend on a product that requires me to tweak the JVM just to make the product look good. My ability to tweak the JVM might go away at any point since I can only patch OpenJDK and Jetbrains recommends the Oracle JDK. Then what? Suck it up and look at the ugly fonts? No, thanks! I'd rather use apps that use SWT and render fonts natively. The couple of Swing apps I use are open source and if I'm sufficiently motivated to continue using them I can port them to SWT or find some other compromise. I wish more people would feel the same, then, maybe, Jetbrains would find a solution, but ,alas, it seems too few people care for Jetbrains to take notice.

Regrettably, fact of the matter is that fonts look bad on Java, particularly on Windows where Java-enabled programs are unable (for whatever reason) to leverage ClearType and thus get the antialiasing done just right.

To pick on Java is my point of contention. Every runtime has warts, If I did some digging I could find issues with any other environment. It just seems like folks pick on Java disproportionately. That might just be the HN echo chamber, but I don't see too many folks bitching about any other non-native runtime.