MacOS Sierra doesn’t have the crispy fonts as they used to be in earlier versions

fontmacosterminal

First, running the following command:

defaults -currentHost read -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing

gives me back 3.

But the fonts nowhere look the way they used to look in earlier versions of macOS. I was using Yosemite before, and today I upgraded to Sierra. Below is the screenshot of Sublime Text editor.

enter image description here

They look OK in iTerm, but elsewhere – including browsers – font rendering is much worse.

So how can I make these fonts as crispy as they used to on earlier macOS/OS X versions? I guess it definitely has something to do with AppleFontSmoothing, or font anti-aliasing in general, but I have tried the many other options in this regard, that are as follows:

  1. Setting AppleFontSmoothing with and without currentHost flag, and restarting the macbook each time I make a change to see the changes.
  2. Ran the command sudo atsutil databases -remove to remove all the user installed fonts.
  3. Re-installing the font that I was using to get the desired result. (Note: I was using "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono")
  4. Tried to change font smoothing option for specific applications like com.apple.terminal but it didn't work either.

Note: a similar question.

Best Answer

Tried clearing the Font caches? Kind of an odd issue- I'm not sure if this is gonna help, but worth a try. Maybe it needs and refresher ;)

defaults -currentHost delete -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing

sudo atsutil databases -remove and reboot, and maybe it needs and refresher. Its odd since it returns a 3, but maybe something is wrong with your defaults.

Re-pply after rebooting AppleFontSmoothing -int 3 and see if anything first without the string set, you already know that - but let keep the references for others:

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 3

Related Question