Fixing font rendering/aliasing in Sublime Text in MacOS Mojave

fix-sublimetext-subpixel.txt

Apple removed colored sub-pixel antialiasing in MacOS Mojave
(https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2018/209/ starting from ~28min)

To make fonts look normal in Sublime Text, add to Preferences:

// For the editor
"font_options": [ "gray_antialias" ],
// For the sidebar / other elements
"theme_font_options": [ "gray_antialias" ],

thanks, this was most helpful

OMG, so much better. Tx!

Thank you very much!

🙏

Here's a copy-pasteable quickfix using jq:

pushd ${HOME}/Library/Application\ Support/Sublime\ Merge/Packages/User/ && \
  echo "$(cat Preferences.sublime-settings)" | \
  jq '. += {"font_options": [ "gray_antialias" ], "theme_font_options": [ "gray_antialias" ]}' | \
  dd of=Preferences.sublime-settings && \
  popd

Perfect, thanks so much!

🙏

I love you

sweet jesus thank you

Best ever than any other system wide changes.

This didn't work well for me, it just made the fonts look the same as when font smoothing is disabled (thin and scratchy). Plus I was still getting blurry fonts in the Terminal. For me, running this command worked the best:

defaults write -g CGFontRenderingFontSmoothingDisabled -bool NO

Now with font smoothing on in Mac preferences (and without the ST preferences above), everything looks fine!

This didn't work well for me, it just made the fonts look the same as when font smoothing is disabled (thin and scratchy). Plus I was still getting blurry fonts in the Terminal. For me, running this command worked the best:

defaults write -g CGFontRenderingFontSmoothingDisabled -bool NO

Now with font smoothing on in Mac preferences (and without the ST preferences above), everything looks fine!

That was true for me for some themes, default new themes worked fine.

Thank you!

The original Gist does not make sense to me.

Sub-pixel AA (i.e. coloured fringes) is what we want, and what was the default in macOS 10.13 and before. So why explicitly set Sublime to use Greyscale AA? That's just doubling down on choosing worse AA (explicitly setting it in Sublime even though it's what macOS 10.14 does out of the box anyway).

---

When using the "defaults write" mechanism, rather than affecting every app on the system, I think it's better to scope it to only affect particular apps you have issues with, e.g.

# Re-enable sub-pixel (as opposed to only greyscale) font AA on macOS 10.14+
defaults write com.sublimetext.3 CGFontRenderingFontSmoothingDisabled 0

p.s. It's not worth doing the above if you use a Retina/HiDPI display. Greyscale font AA looks fine at high DPI, which is probably why Apple chose to make their change. Though, I don't understand why they didn't limit it to only when a Retina display is being used.

Thank you, I've been suffering with this for months.

Oh wow, this helped me on Linux as well! Thanks!