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zed-industries
Better text rendering
Check for existing issues
- [X] Completed
Describe the feature
i mainly use WebStorm/JetBrains' products for one reason, the text-rendering especially on Mac is unparalleled. In these 2 photos the red text is from WebStorm and the blue text is from Zed. as you can see, text from Zed is a lot more pixelated/jagged giving it a rougher look on Retina displays especially, and given that Zed is only a Mac editor, that seems like an odd choice to me. whereas on Webstorm (red text), the colors blend more gradually at the edges of the characters giving it a much cleaner look.
im curious, is this a byproduct of the GPUI framework Zed is built on? A tradeoff for the ridiculous speed Zed runs on?
If applicable, add mockups / screenshots to help present your vision of the feature
Looks like different font hinting? The glyphs in the red image seem much better aligned to the pixel grid.
some more examples with different typefaces, the OP is Commit Mono. apple's native xCode also has similar rendering to JetBrains/Webstorm in this case...
zed is red
sf mono:
berkeley mono:
I wonder if this is actually caused by incorrect blending. While investigating transparent windows I found that MoltenVK - and I assume by extension MtlLayer - only supports post-multiplied alpha for blending transparent windows.
However it seems that the blending mode of the renderer pipelines in Zed is set up for pre-multiplied blending! At least in the blade renderer this appears to be the case -- I have not double-checked whether it also applies to the Metal renderer.
I would expect that blending within an opaque window would work be independent of what the compositor does/can do but since font rasterization is offloaded to CoreText, it does not sound too far fetched that it would be generating glyphs for post-multiplied alpha blending.
BUMP
This is by far the worst part about Zed at the moment. Can someone PLEASE look into this?
FYI - I had similar issues trying to get WezTerm to look as good as Alacritty on my Macbook when using an external monitor. It was finally resolved when I changed the "front end" to use WebGpu.
BUMP!
I've decided to try Zed because of the aesthetics and I'm not using it on a daily basis because of this.
