MacOS – How to restore default Mountain Lion font distribution

Warning: this is not my final answer, it will take some time to provide a better one.

Tested on OS X 10.8.5 with XQuartz 2.7.4 (xorg-server 1.13.0) and:

• meld - installed via brew install meld
• xterm
• xclock

To tune the fonts create a file ~/.Xresources and put this:

Xft.dpi:        96
Xft.antialias:  true
Xft.hinting:    true
Xft.autohint:   true
Xft.rgba:       rgb
Xft.hintstyle:  hintfull

XTerm*faceName: DejaVu Sans Mono
*faceName: DejaVu Sans Mono

Inside ~/.gtkrc-2.0:

style "user-font" {
    font_name = "Lucida Grande 10"
}
widget_class "*" style "user-font"

gtk-font-name="Lucida Grande 10"
gtk-enable-mnemonics = 0

Feel free to post your modifications, as long they are using standard Fonts available on OS X, I would like to make this drop-in recipe.

The last file has an effect on meld and other gtk apps.

Note, the font is the same as the one used in OS X UI but the rendering is still a little bit different.

JDK 7 will be installed under /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.7.0.jdk, JDK 6 under /System/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines.

To trick OS X to accept Java 7 instead of proposing to install Java 6 a simple symlink is enough:

sudo mkdir /System/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines
sudo ln -s /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.7.0.jdk /System/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.6.0.jdk

Most Java Programms will run with this little hack without the need to install Java 6. OS X's Java Preferences (and maybe some others) will not as it seems to explicitly check the version of the JVM when it is started.