Blurry fonts on a non-HiDPI external monitor in MacOS

[steeef]

This is the same issue as #661, but the issue is worse with font-thicken = true set in config.

I typically use Monaco at 10pt in my terminals. As a baseline, here's what iTerm2 looks like:

And here's ghostty with the same font and size:

The difference is that I have Anti-aliased disabled in iTerm2:

If I enable font-thicken, the blur becomes more pronounced:

Whereas on my primary display it looks fine:

My current font config:

❯ ghostty +show-config | grep font
font-family = Monaco
font-family-bold = Monaco
font-family-italic = Monaco
font-family-bold-italic = Monaco
font-size = 10
font-thicken = true

[cwlbraa]

3840x1600 produces similarly blurry fonts. I was going to report the same thing with Hack fonts.

I'm also coming from iTerm2, but I do leave font anti-aliasing enabled... I don't think this issue is just anti-aliasing vs not.

ghostty on left, iterm2 on right

ghostty font-thicken=true on left, iterm2 on right

[steeef]

Poked around to see what other people have done:
#4099
Using ghostty 1.0.1 with the Terminus font:

with these settings:

❯ ghostty +show-config
font-family = Terminus (TTF)
font-family-bold = Terminus (TTF)
font-family-italic = Terminus (TTF)
font-family-bold-italic = Terminus (TTF)
font-size = 11
adjust-cell-height = -2
freetype-load-flags = no-hinting,no-force-autohint,no-monochrome,no-autohint

I can't seem to remove hinting/anti-aliasing.