Thank you for the example. That shows exactly what I was talking about, so this issue is clearly (at least somewhat) a matter of taste. To my eyes, those VSCode samples look harsh, crudely pixelated like something out of the 1990s, while the Zed samples look like normal anti-aliased text.
Ahh, thanks for the explanation. I guess I was thrown off by the screenshot attached to that bug report upthread, where someone compared zed's rendering against completely non-anti-aliased text rendered by VS Code.
No, this is a thing where the text is honest to God blurry on non-4K displays. The macOS version of Zed on a low DPI display has the worst font rendering of any application I've ever seen, and I used desktop Linux twenty years ago.
It's like they're rendering a high resolution font at low resolution using the simplest possible algorithm without lining it up with the pixel grid. It's very fuzzy. Characters have this weird sort of additive color intensity where strokes intersect that reminds me of Geometry Wars. It's broken.
They are working on it; the Windows build has decent rendering, and apparently the Linux version substantially improved recently. But they haven't gotten to macOS quite yet. I've been checking in on Zed every few weeks since it went public waiting for a fix.
It might be. I can't speak for anybody else, but it's probably the term I'd use myself if I was trying to explain it, even if it's perhaps not exactly the perfect one. The pixel edges just end up not hard enough, and the pixel corners just end up not sharp enough, and my eyes don't seem to like it. Whatever they're looking for when they're looking at text, pixelly text and printed text seem to supply it, and anti-aliased text doesn't.
(Though there must be some cutoff point past which the pixel size becomes irrelevant. I certainly don't mind reading stuff on the iPad.)
No settings to adjust?