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:
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".
> The entire Zed code editor is open source under GPL version 3, and scratch-built in Rust all the way down to handcrafted GPU shaders and OS graphics API calls.
When I saw this, I immediately wondered what strange rendering bugs Zim might run into. This was before reading your comment.
In my opinion, this type of graphics work is not the core functionality of a text editor, same has been solved already in libraries. There is no reason to reinvent that wheel... Or if there is then please mention why.
Most likely there were no ready libraries when they started. Even now there are very few that can be called stable. And even then many of them are HTML based.
So if you are going to spend that much time developing GUI from scratch you might as well make it your own library and get full control.
shrink the zed window by one pixel horizontally and one pixel vertically. there's a video on that issue page which shows resizing making the font go in and out of focus, and that tells me that there's something dividing the window height and width by 2 and starting the font rendering there. if you divide by 2 and you get .5, you'll see the blurriness. if you make the window 1 pixel wider you won't get x.5 anymore, you'll get a whole number.
try it and see. i bet that helps/fixes at least some of you suffering from this.
It can happen at any scaling, depending on how you anchor controls in the application window.
A text area anchored correctly to the top and left of the window would absolutely not move no matter how tall or wide the window is, and no display scaling setting would impact that.
Not sure if it's related, but I've built Zed from source to try on Windows (I haven't tried it on other platforms), and it does not look good sadly, it's also quite a bit "uncrisp" or something - I don't really have the words to describe.
Everything, including zed, looks fine in the 95dpi (1080p 23") monitor I use right now with my macbook.
I have had similar blurring problems with a certain monitor (1920x1200 27"), which was resolved with changing some sharpening settings in the monitor itself. Strangely, that setting did not look well at my colleague's macbook, who was also often using that monitor, while the original settings looked fine, so we had to change the settings back and forth every time the other person had to use it. I do not think I was using zed at the time, other apps had that issue.
Does your monitor have a nonstandard rgb pattern? If zed is trying to do its own subpixel rendering then getting the pattern wrong is going to mess up your results.
If you are using MacOS, unfortunately, your issue is that you are using a 1440p monitor, not an issue with any one program.
Apple has removed support for font rendering methods which make text on non-integer scaled screens look sharper. As a result, if you want to use your screen without blurry text, you have to use 1080p (1x), 4k (2x 1080p), 5k (2x 1440p) or 6k screens (or any other screens where integer scaling looks ok).
To see the difference, try connecting a Windows/Linux machine to your monitor and comparing how text looks compared to the same screen with a MacOS device.
This comment is incorrect, I have tried the editor on both MacOS and Linux, and texts looks like crap on both if you're using your screen at its native resolution. The difference is easily visible in screenshots.
native resolution on any monitor should work fine on MacOS.
using pixel fonts on any non-integer multiplier of the native resolution will always result in horrible font rendering, I don't care what OS you're on.
I use MacOS on all kinds of displays as I move throughout the day, some of them are 1x, some are 2x, and some are somewhere in between. using a vector font in Zed looks fine on all of them. It did not look fine when I used a pixel font that I created for myself, but that's how pixel fonts work, not the fault of MacOS.
Both hinting and subpixel rendering are things on MacOS. MacOS just doesn’t color the pixel for LCDs like Windows does, because the GUI on MacOS is resolution independent.
It is greyscale font rendering, yes, but it is coloring those pixels based on subpixel information.
1440p monitor would probably be why the text is blurry - there simply isn't enough pixels to make things smooth without resorting to special hacks to improve LowDPI text rendering, which with more and more displays being HiDPI many don't bother doing.
I am amazed people consider 1440p low resolution. My knee-jerk reaction was to assume you were sarcastic. I use a monitor of roughly that many lines of pixels and have never had observed blurry text in the tools I use (and I use fairly small fonts).
Look, you can insist that a 1440p monitor can only show blurry text all you like, but the problem that people are talking about is that the text is even blurrier than that.
I have native 1440p 120Hz on my main screen which is more than 30inches across (ultrawide). I can see pixels if I look close enough, but I do not see any pixels at usual reading distance.
I have used retina displays of various sizes -- but after a while I just set them down to half their resolution usually (i.e. I do not use the 200% scaling from the OS, rather set them to be 1440p (or lower on 13inch laptops)). I have not seen an advantage to retina displays.
Text on 1440p looks great with full hinting and subpixel rendering. Unfortunately, macOS does neither, so the jump to retina feels more significant than it is.
Biggest draw for me with 1440p 32" is being the same DPI as a 1080p 24". I like to have one big monitor and then 2 small flank vertical monitors and having them all be the same DPI just makes headaches go away on every operating system I use them with.
How big is your screen? At 27", I can clearly see pixels on 1440p. A 4k display with 150% scaling (effectively 1440p) looks much better. Maybe you haven't used a higher resolution? If so, you might not know what you're missing.
Not GP. But I have a 24" 4k (close to retina), the MBA screen and while they're nicer than the 27" 1440p I have, the latter is essentially worthless on macOS. With Linux, it's more than fine. Not super sharp, but quite readable. On macOS, the blurred text is headache inducing.
(cross-posting on both subthreads): I have native 1440p 120Hz on my main screen which is more than 30inches across (ultrawide). I can see pixels if I look close enough, but I do not see any pixels at usual reading distance.
I have used retina displays of various sizes -- but after a while I just set them down to half their resolution usually (i.e. I do not use the 200% scaling from the OS, rather set them to be 1440p (or lower on 13inch laptops)). I have not seen an advantage to retina displays.
I mean the last time I saw anyone have a 1440p display was back in the early 2010's, so ... nowadays most people that I know buy 4k 27"/32" displays at minimum, with 5k displays gaining popularity as the price for them goes down. Macbooks for example come with a very high resolution display, and so do most high-end PC laptops, too.
I did not say people used 4k displays in early 2010s en masse, I said that's when I last saw people use 1440p displays. I live in present time, and in present time 4k displays are very cheap. It gets a little more pricey if you want high refresh rate as well, though my 4k 144hz display was just around 400 EUR, which I would consider a lower-mid-tier price range.
1440p is high enough for anything depending on screen size.
If they're running everything on the GPU then their SDF text rendering needs more work to be resolution independent. I'm assuming they use SDFs, or some variant of that.
Really, the screen isn't the issue given that on other editors OP says it is fine.
I check back on the GitHub issue every few months and it just has more votes and more supportive comments, but no acknowledgement.
Hopefully someone can rescue us from the sluggish VS Code.
https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7992
I have a 1440p monitor and seeing this issue.