Sublime Text / Spyder / Text-antialiasing Windows

Question

In a nutshell, I can't get text in Spyder to look nearly as good as Sublime Text. (I have the same basic problem with PyCharm in comparison to Sublime, as well).

Below is a pic of the same file (Sublime left, Spyder right), side by side in both programs, same font (Source Code Pro, 13 points), both running Monokai Extended Bright, which I went in and tweaked a little to get the colors to match as much as possible. ClearType is on.

Is there anything that can be done to make text - pardon the pun - more Sublime? Some programs seem to have good font rendering (Sublime, Cmder/Conemu with cmd.exe), others not so much. It's clearly possible to make the text look good on Windows, is there anything that can be done from a user-level to fix it?

Answer 1

Aside from running through the entire Clear Type setup again (which I'd recommend doing, it helped me out a lot recently), there's not much you can do to modify how individual programs render text. Some Windows programs tie in to the Windows libraries for rendering text and graphics (and I believe there are a number to choose from, as well as different versions, so performance among them may vary considerably depending on your hardware and software), while others either take advantage of third-party libraries or, like Sublime, roll their own. The general consensus online from people who should know is that Jon Skinner, the creator of Sublime Text, wrote his own GUI library in C++, one of the reasons for Sublime's small size and speed - only the functions that are needed are there, not the whole kitchen sink. Notes in the various dev builds indicate that he's tweaked it quite a bit, so I would imagine the performance is just getting better. PyCharm's authors likely don't have Skinner's level of obsession with font rendering, and their graphics engine may not have that level of tuning capability at any rate.

Answer 2

I can help you with pycharm;

settings/editor/appearance, and check the 'use anti-aliased fonts' box. something I remember about source code pro on windows, TTF files were smoother than OTF ones.