Default font in Eclipse on OSX is terrible (and blurred)

Question

Removing

-Dorg.eclipse.swt.internal.carbon.smallFonts

from eclipse.ini and changing the font to menlo seems to improve the situation a bit. However the font is still a bit unsharp, compared to Xcode.

I don't see why they ship it like that or do they just don't care about the mac version?

Answer 1

What version of OSX and of Eclipse are you using?

• Menlo is a Snow Leopard font
• SWT has a Cocoa port in Eclipse 3.5

smallFonts were fixed for SWT Cocoa only in 3.5.

(picture of font menlo in action)

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From this thread

I solved the problem with the two commands:

defaults write org.eclipse.eclipse AppleAntiAliasingThreshold 9
defaults write global AppleSmoothFixedFontsSizeThreshold 9

I had to restart my system before seeing a change. I don't know exactly which command solved it.

Answer 2

Humm I still think Xcode looks a bit better, but this is probably also because of the smaller font.

Answer 3

I recommend trying Anonymous Pro, it's a free monospaced font, works very well for me. Read more here.

There's also Consolas, from Microsoft, which is very good. More details on how to get it on a Mac can be found here.