Holy moly, an often forgotten, simple, yet effective tip worth sharing:
I forgot how turning off font smoothing makes the world of difference on retina/high PPI screens. If using a non-apple external monitor, especially those with the less adopted formats, on a mac, font smoothing will make your fonts more bold or blurry, disabling is a must for programmers as it's probably making your code fonts less readable.
Since Big Sur, font smoothing can be adjusted in two ways.
Via the terminal
defaults -currentHost write -g AppleFontSmoothing -int 0
- "0" disables font smoothing
- "1" enables light font smoothing
- "2" enables default medium smoothing
- "3" enables strong smoothing
- Thus, If you wish to revert to the default setting simply replace the "0" at the end of the command with a "2".
Via a helper app
Luckily, if you're not comfortable changing setting via the command line, someones kindly made a helper app (a little overkill but makes it super easy).
https://www.fontsmoothingadjuster.com
Learn more
Nikita Prokopov (the chap behind Fira Code) wrote a super in-depth post regarding font smoothing, displays, pixels and resolutions. Check it out for more context.
Have a good'un.
Sam.
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