HOWTO: Configure IDEA Fonts
I’m using IDEA 7 (Selena) beta, which runs under Java 6. Since Java 6 includes support for subpixel rendering, I figured fonts in IDEA would look a lot nicer. They don’t.
Hmm…after a bit of research, I found this explanation:
The good news is that JDK 6 implements this feature. Whether you use the look and feel of Metal, Microsoft Windows, or GTK, you will get the same antialiasing behavior for fonts in Java technology-based applications as you do in native applications. Best of all, you don’t have to do anything — it just works out of the box.
In order to achieve this, the look and feel of Windows and of GTK have also been updated to track the user’s desktop preferences and update any preference changes in real time. Also, the default Java technology look and feel, Metal, now reads the user’s desktop text-antialiasing preferences on startup and applies them to the JDK fonts.
What’s Wrong with IDEA?
Java 6 supports subpixel rendering, but only if the Look and Feel reads the user’s desktop preferences. Metal reads the preferences at startup, while Windows and GTK read them “real time” in case you make changes in Windows while your Java app is running. Out of the box (at least for me, maybe it is reading some old preferences file), IDEA uses the Alloy Look and Feel, which (from what I see on the web site) has not been updated since 2003.
Recommended Configuration
To see the subpixel rendering Goodness, go to Settings -> Appearance, and change the Look and Feel to Windows or Metal, or I suppose whatever Look and Feel is native to your platform of choice.
This changes all of the trees, menus, tabs, and dialogs to use subpixel rendering. But my editors still look bad. The editors don’t seem to use the subpixel rendering, at least that’s what it looks like to me. I found that selecting “Use antialiased font in editor” makes the editor font look significantly better.
Finally, on Windows, my new favorite programming font is Consolas, which is bundled with Vista and available as a free download for XP. This is configured in the Settings -> Colors & Fonts dialog.
One More Thing to Try
You might also try tweaking the IDEA_HOME/bin/idea.properties file, changing the sun.java2d.noddraw value from false to true. This might improve graphics performance, but for me, it causes Vista to downgrade to some weird reduced color mode. Your mileage may vary.
Thanks for the tip. IDEA 7 for me was using “IDEA (4.5 default)” as the theme. I already did have the “Use anti-aliased font in editor” checkbox turned on. Changing the the theme to “Windows”, I notice there is somewhat more anti-aliasing going on, but it still is poor quality compared to native ClearType. I don’t want to understate things, so I will bluntly say that the overall text clarity is very very poor in IDEA vs. Eclipse. This means the editor text, the menu text, all of it.
I think there was an option in IDEA 6 to adjust the font kerning to better match the native platform, but that option seems gone. From what I understand that without special kerning, much of the goodness of sub-pixel rendering is not realized.
The choice to create SWT was a very good move on IBM’s part. The years have shown that “native Java” is a dead platform when it comes to building compelling end-user applications. Sun just doesn’t “get it” when “it” has to do with anything outside of servers.
It’s getting awfully hard to justify paying top dollar for a Java IDE that cannot even render text as well as the native platform. Maybe JetBrains should look at ditching Swing and moving to SWT…