Claude Code: Now in Beta in Zed

Their font rendering looks awful on non-high dpi displays, and the devs don't seem to care at all. https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7992

That figures, their lead platform was the Mac where HiDPI is totally ubiquitous, so their renderer probably has no provisions for subpixel font rendering.

My guess: their shaders or text rendering don't account for sub-pixel anti-aliasing, which is critical to getting decent text rendering on low pixel density displays.

If they'd used Skia (which is what Electron and Chromium use), they would've got this for free. Instead they tried to reinvent the world and didn't realise how big the world was.

While this is probably annoying, I have to imagine that non-hidpi displays are becoming rarer and rarer. It's probably not a great idea to spend a lot of work on a feature that will only ever see declining use.

While I do not doubt that there are people who experience this on some monitor/OS combinations, I have used zed on basic 1080p and 1440p 24" monitors with no issue. Sometimes I have general issues with some monitors in macos, which is usually due to some super-resolution/sharpness setting on the monitor itself that I need to adjust, but nothing specific to zed. All I say is that these issues are far from universal with non-hidpi monitors.

I won't use zed for this very reason.

I love how we just reinvent the wheel again, and again, and again, and again...

MacOS native apps have had great sub-pixel rendering all along, but I guess since we have to develop everything in Electron now it's time to reimplement all the exiting functionality.

> MacOS native apps have had great sub-pixel rendering all along

Apple removed subpixel anti-aliasing in Mojave, seven years ago, because it's not necessary on the HiDPI/Retina displays they ship as standard. They still do greyscale anti-aliasing but that's not the same thing as subpixel.

Discussion from the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17476873

> because it's not necessary on the HiDPI/Retina displays they ship as standard.

I disagree. Subpixel anti-aliasing triples the available horizontal resolution, and makes text crisper. The algorithms are known and regardless of the density it should always be applied to text and vector graphics elements.

The RGB stripe layout is so useful that OLED manufacturers are moving to it in 2026, away from the long-derided PenTile where magenta/green fringing is seen even on the densest displays.

In fact rendering on macOS is completely broken, and I don't know how people stand by it. At any scaling factor selected that is not a perfect factor of the actual hardware resolution (the 'looks like' value in Settings), the final framebuffer is scaled and interpolated to the display resolution, and everything is noticeably more blurry.

Windows has had some form of hardware-independent rendering since Windows 7, and proper pixel density control arrived in Windows 8.

It's not rare at all. It's more common than not for people developing on monitors.

You may not notice because macOS fonts look terrible (blurry) on any monitor that is not hidpi. Zed is just par for the course here.

Meanwhile on Linux and Windows, they still implement subpixel rendering so fonts look great on 1440p.

Subpixel rendering is effective but it's also a massive pain in the ass to maintain, especially if you want to take full advantage of the GPU. Microsoft has kept it around for much longer but even they are steadily moving away, bits and pieces of the Win11 UI render with greyscale AA regardless of system settings because their newer GUI toolkits don't even attempt to support subpixel fonts.

That said, for something like a text editor where fonts are central the entire application and the worst subpixel edge cases like animation are unlikely to come up, it's maybe not unreasonable to ask them to go the extra mile. It's going to be a sticking point on Windows and Linux for a long time if they don't.

- As mentioned, macOS removed subpixel anti aliasing a while ago

- Zed is not an electron app

- In the linked issue you can see that this issue does not exist in Electron.

At least on Arch it works fine on 13" 1080p, 24" 1440p and 27" 4k displays.

This discussion goes back twenty years, with Apple going for preserving the original typeface appearance over crispness. It depends what you value the most and is entirely subjective.

There are 2 issues on Apple:

1) How much font hinting to apply. More hinting changes the shape to make glyphs line up better with pixels so that less antialiasing is required. macOS prefers very light hinting to preserve shapes at the cost of blurriness. This is what you are talking about.

2) Subpixel rendering. This effectively triples the horizontal resolution when rendering fonts, and does not affect the shape at all. Fonts look dramatically better on normal dpi displays when using it. macOS removed support for this many years ago. This is what I'm talking about.

It's frustrating because even on macOS, every other text editor looks better on a 1440p display.

As far as I can figure out, the root issue is even simpler than that. Their hinter is broken. The edges of characters aren't aligned with the pixel grid, so there's lots of fuzzy/blurry looking text.

That's wild to me. That's something I don't think I can ever go back to at this point.

Do you use macOS? Fonts look great on Linux with hinting and subpixel rendering at 1440p. I could never use macOS with such a setup.

FHD and below will keep existing on mobile for hardware and power consumption reasons

As I said, I do notice when it is blurry, and in such a case it is a problem with anything that is rendered on that monitor not just zed. As I said, this does not happen "on any monitor" that is not hidpi. I use multiple operating systems on my day to day work, so I am not as brainwashed by apple as to not notice when such rendering issues arise.

I know some people have bad experiences with 1440p and macos for some reason, but I haven't had any such experience that I could not fix. So all these are not universal. Some people act as if any monitor below 200dpi will look terrible on macsos. This is definitely not the case.

Other operating systems have three times the horizontal resolution when rendering fonts. It’s simply not possible to fix it on macOS because they removed subpixel rendering. It’s absolutely true that macOS fonts look substantially more blurry than fonts on other operating systems that implement subpixel rendering when you’re using a 1440p monitor.