> I know this is silly but the biggest thing that’s driving me away from it is how god awfully blurry it looks on my 1440p screen :/

Not silly at all. User experience is important. If you're going to spend as much time in a tool as most programmers do in their editors, it should look and feel nice.

So they're optimizing for 1080p or 4k?

No settings to adjust?

optimized for HiDPI screens (like those on Apple devices)

ohhh... is this that thing where people say "blurry" to describe anti-aliasing, because they actually want it to be pixelated?

No, this is a thing where the text is honest to God blurry on non-4K displays. The macOS version of Zed on a low DPI display has the worst font rendering of any application I've ever seen, and I used desktop Linux twenty years ago.

It's like they're rendering a high resolution font at low resolution using the simplest possible algorithm without lining it up with the pixel grid. It's very fuzzy. Characters have this weird sort of additive color intensity where strokes intersect that reminds me of Geometry Wars. It's broken.

They are working on it; the Windows build has decent rendering, and apparently the Linux version substantially improved recently. But they haven't gotten to macOS quite yet. I've been checking in on Zed every few weeks since it went public waiting for a fix.

It might be. I can't speak for anybody else, but it's probably the term I'd use myself if I was trying to explain it, even if it's perhaps not exactly the perfect one. The pixel edges just end up not hard enough, and the pixel corners just end up not sharp enough, and my eyes don't seem to like it. Whatever they're looking for when they're looking at text, pixelly text and printed text seem to supply it, and anti-aliased text doesn't.

(Though there must be some cutoff point past which the pixel size becomes irrelevant. I certainly don't mind reading stuff on the iPad.)

Nope, it is the thing where people say "blurry" to describe "blurry".

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7992#issuecomme...

This is how Zed looks like on my computer too. VSCode manages to render things crisply while Zed is a blurry mess.

Thank you for the example. That shows exactly what I was talking about, so this issue is clearly (at least somewhat) a matter of taste. To my eyes, those VSCode samples look harsh, crudely pixelated like something out of the 1990s, while the Zed samples look like normal anti-aliased text.

No other editor or app that I use on macOS looks like this. None. This is not just AA, I like properly AA’d text.

Ahh, thanks for the explanation. I guess I was thrown off by the screenshot attached to that bug report upthread, where someone compared zed's rendering against completely non-anti-aliased text rendered by VS Code.

I don't have this problem, but issues like this are always a huge barrier, especially when you want users from a polished code editor like VSCode. Personally, I use it because VSCodium does not support the default Python LSP on my Linux box. I like it, but there are definitely areas that seem rough around the edges. My biggest issue is the size of the font and icons. I use a 4K screen, and while the font is readable, the icons are so tiny that I can barely see them. Since it is a new system, I don't just know where they are like I would if it were VSCode.

Yeah same, plus I have poor eyesight so I have to zoom then to click anything

This is also a big issue for me and has one of the largets issues for a while. [1] I wish there was font hinting to the like of windows font rendering.

[1] https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7992

That's not silly! Great UX is table stakes.

Try the latest version, it should be better

Personally, I never registered that as a problem, but I can see the delta in screenshots between versions.

Oh that’s exciting to hear, hopefully it’s better! I’ll give it a shot

I have the same problem on Linux-wayland/4K screen. I can't get it to look anywhere near "okay".

It's been that way since day one. Wild that they haven't fixed it. Edit: it was fixed in Oct 2025, version 0.207.4